The wide acceptance of social media platforms like YouTube has been proved to be a precious weapon for the police department. Law Enforcement Agencies are gaining power in solving crimes. That is by participating in uploading the video surveillance footage, especially on YouTube.
Today the public safety is futuristic and the communication speed very much faster than the old days. We see the most advanced law of enforcement tools. That are ranging from posters to patrol cars, police radio, and social media networks like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
This department is enhancing its capability of eradicating crimes by using social media networks. It helps them to find the missing children, intimating about thieves and terrorists, alert suspicious activity of neighbors and informing the neighborhood crimes to the public, etc.
Law of enforcement agencies such as police department is exploring the usage of social media sites like YouTube. Mainly, to get the information like in gathering the information like riots and mob violence, etc.
The protesters are making the better way of communication through social media in quickly that too in real-time. The police should know how to monitor these kinds of communication. That is to measure whether the criminal activity threats are developing and mood of the crowd.
How the Law Enforcement Agencies uses YouTube?
As we already discussed the social media channels like YouTube are the major helping hands for law enforcement agencies. Most of us who are the users of YouTube can find many videos. Such relating to suspicious or illegal activities and reporting it to higher authorities.
This department uses it for tracking the criminal networks and missing persons etc. This has become the verifying evidence for the police that holds nearly 90% of court time.
The essential thing is that there is no special treatment for the law of enforcement members when investigating on YouTube.
They assigned their privacy and legal rights for each website. The warrant is necessary before turning over the private information to the authorities.
Most of the criminals think that the erasing of their social media activity so simple.
Whereas, the social media channels like YouTube can get back the deleted posts and deactivated accounts in the archive the implicating evidence.
Pulling out YouTube to find the hidden communities, users, and extremist videos
Most of the users are using YouTube to spread fanaticism and has become the platform for like-minded people as online-based distribution.
People from different countries interact, share, and publicize their ideas. YouTube breaks the record of holding the extensive user database. Especially the user-generated video content along with racist and malicious comments.
In such cases, the YouTube administrators remove that offensive video content from the specific YouTube channel.
The videos which are tending to promote extremism and hate. The users who are being as the influencers and leaders to spread fanaticism and the hidden social networks and virtual communities of sharing agenda. That comes under cyber-hate on YouTube will be traced by the law of enforcement or security analyst.
The research on hate videos on YouTube, communities, and users can be the best source to understand the problems and can provide solutions.
What do they consider on YouTube?
Analysis of online hate videos:
They study the terrorist group and extremist videos and then analyze jihadi videos.
They focus on analyzing the production features, communication approach, and video types.
Analyze the datasets from the group within YouTube by studying the online radicalization. Also, they consider the information of user profile, performing lexical and sentiment analysis. Mostly, on comments, fetch the insights basing on gender depending on views, demographics, metrics and complete analysis on a social network that is playing a role on promoting jihad content on YouTube.
Analysis of YouTube social network:
Plenty of research papers are available on the study of YouTube video content sharing social networks and community analysis.
They make a study on the structure and properties of social networks on YouTube. Concentrate on the network of YouTube subscriptions with the help of crawler.
Analyze social relationships and structural relationships between users and videos.
Examine the collected data from YouTube, Orkut, and LiveJournal. Generate the large-scale study metrics and analyze the structure of multiple online social networks.
Analyzing video and user properties:
The essential aspects of YouTube are users and videos. Here the number of likes each video, and each user got on YouTube will be considered by the department.
Along with them, the comments, dislikes, shares, and rating will be analyzed by that department.
User friends and related videos:
Create unique set user ids for who upload the videos of 75. The user creates a profile and invites friends to follow. Basing on the profile settings the user friends list can be private or public.
When the user friends list is not in private, then that can be viewed and retrieved by using YouTube APIs.
They generate the social network graph of uploaders of YouTube videos that have the hidden influential and virtual community users.
Subscription relationship network:
In contrast to the bidirectional connection of friends relationship, YouTube offers unidirectional subscription connection. With this subscription theme, the user can subscribe to another user channel.
Through the subscriptions strategy, they can get additional audience insights where they can analyze the user behavior.
With this subscription relationship, they can figure out the hate promoting video content and users.
Generating videos, role-play sessions:
They produce multiple video sets of their role-play sessions. That is helpful for the upcoming generations who are willing to join this department.
Hence, they might help them to know what is going to happen inside the department and what they need to do.
The impact of Social Media on Law of Enforcement Department
The enforcement department can broaden the intelligence gathering and also pull the public support.
The best example of how it helps them to solve the issue is ‘a person aware of the scheme to kill the soldiers and civilians at the military processing center that too with automatic grenades and weapons.’
They got information about the terror attack, and the police department arrested the two suspects. However, no one is hurt.
List of Enforcement channels using YouTube
Law Enforcement Network:
This channel features the footage of the police body cam, citizen recorded footage, and dash cam footage that are documenting the law enforcement duties.
wwwICEgov:
It is U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigative agency. They protect national security by implementing the immigration and customs laws. In this channel, they upload the videos of their activity and events that take place.
DoJRP Community:
They generate the member created and promotional video content about the role play patrols of Law of Enforcement Departments and Fire Department on Grand Theft Auto5.
Chicago Police:
This is Chicago Police Department official YouTube channel, and they upload the footage of the incidents and the press releases of their department.
Baltimore Police:
Baltimore Police Department is the ninth largest police agency. They offer dedicated service to the residents, visitors, and business owners of Baltimore, Maryland. In this channel, they produce the footage of the incidents, videos of ceremonies, and press releases.
Conclusion
The Law of Enforcement Department is using YouTube in several best ways to win the cases of the crimes. These agencies are becoming more advanced by following the public using social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Along with the advantages, there are some disadvantages.
