Skip to footer

Detroit gangs use social media to brag – which helps police find and arrest them

Police departments in Detroit and across the country are becoming more sophisticated in mining social media to solve crimes.

|
Rebecca Cook/Reuters/File
A Detroit Police car drives past a barbershop on Seven Mile Road, where the night before a shooting occurred, in Detroit, Michigan, in 2013.
  • By Lonnie Shekhtman Staff

The graffiti tags were supposed to mark territory for Detroit's "Band Crew" and burnish its illicit brand.

Instead, the tags – "Band Crew," "#22 BandCrew," "YNCMH" and "PBF" – were among the clues police used on social media to link gang members to alleged attempted murders, shootings, drug deals, and robberies.

Just this week, this helped secure the arrest of eight members of Band Crew, in addition to members of other gangs arrested in the past year.

A simple search of the tags on Facebook turns up photos of a bag of cash. A pistol-wielding young men surfaces on Instagram, flashing what looks like gang signs with his free hand. And a shaky cell-phone video on YouTube shows what appears to be Band Crew members chasing someone through Detroit street traffic.

The draw of social glory for criminals is paying off handsomely for police departments across the country, many of which are tapping social networks to monitor the activity of suspects and their friends. Mining Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter is helping 4 out of 5 US police departments solve crimes, according to a 2014 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

"I get asked all the time, 'Why do gangs do that?'," meaning post so much on social media, said Lyle Dungy, crime specialist in Detroit, in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Dungy is the intelligence director for the Detroit Crime Commission, which helps police in the city fight crime. 

"And I answer: because they feel like no one is watching," he said. 

But they are. Of the 600 law enforcement agencies surveyed across the country, 95 percent reported using social media to create undercover identities to monitor suspects’ accounts, to post surveillance videos, to gather clues from the public, and to scan for suspicious activity and profiles. 79 percent reported that social media has helped them solve crimes.

"I was able to identify a drug dealer known only by his street name and physical description by finding him on another dealer’s page. He was showing off his bike and you could see the plate. Got the registration and ID’d him," reported an unidentified officer in a 2014 report by Lexis Nexis on social media use in law enforcement.

Dungy said that in Detroit, it’s the younger gangs – middle and high school age – that have embraced social media, which is a boon for police, since those also tend to be the most violent gangs.

"They seem to have embraced social media as ways to brag about their activities, threaten rivals, and impress their peers," explained Dungy. "It’s good for us."

Social media content can be used as evidence in court, said Dungy. And even evidence hidden behind private accounts, visible only to hand-picked followers, is accessible to police through fake profiles that criminals accept as friends or followers, or through search warrants.

Search warrants presented to companies like Facebook and Twitter can reveal information including e-mail addresses and account holders' real names, said Dungy. In some cases, even IP addresses can help identify a person’s address.

None of this suppresses the gang members' apparently insatiable desire to share.

"It is amazing that people still 'brag' about their actions on social media sites. Yeah, even their criminal actions," an unidentified police officer told Lexis Nexis … back in 2012.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Detroit gangs use social media to brag – which helps police find and arrest them
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0924/Detroit-gangs-use-social-media-to-brag-which-helps-police-find-and-arrest-them
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe