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LOGAN — Did somebody place an angry or offensive post on your Facebook wall? How about an obscene direct message sent via Twitter? You can defriend, block or report the person. Or, you can simply call the police.
Logan police say more people in its city are choosing to simply call the police. The department has fielded roughly a dozen social media-based complaints since February, some of which are over objectionable wall posts.
“Similar types of disputes and issues between people that have always been going on are starting to transition more to these social media sites and becoming a little bit more public,” Lt. Brad Franke said.
Officers will certainly help in social media cases, though they say a lot of incidents end in noncriminal resolutions. Franke says it’s part of the job.
“I think it’s important to remember that a vast majority of everything that we do as law enforcement is noncriminal,” Franke said. “Historically, we have always been sort of involved in the social parenting of our community; and the similar things we do in those situations, we try to do with these.”
That includes contacting people, helping to resolve disputes, mediating and even bringing problems to the attention of website administrators.
Police may be coming from a place of empathy. Online problems happen to them, too.
“In fact, we had one of our officers here at our police department get his account hacked and sent out messages to all of his friends,” Franke said. “Several of them put in their passwords and everybody had to go and change their passwords because everybody got compromised.”
Hacking, password theft and fraud obviously raise the alert level for police. The actions do constitute crimes, and several of Logan’s complaints have been related to those issues.
At the Cache County Sheriff’s Office, Lt. Matt Bilodeau says more cases make it to them that have risen to a criminal level.
“We have had thefts and burglaries where people have advertised, 'Hey it’s really great here in Hawaii and I’m enjoying myself,'” Bilodeau said. “Unbeknownst to them, friends way down the line — that they’ve forgotten they’ve befriended because they want 800 of them — are taking advantage of that, taking note of that.”
Bilodeau says other con artists will discover family members’ names through Facebook, and then conduct a more conventional scam – perhaps calling an elderly woman, identifying as a relative, and claiming to need money.
Cache County has had its own calls stemming from simpler social media disputes, but Bilodeau says the numbers are low and not increasing.
Officers at the Salt Lake City, Unified and Sandy police departments also said they have had occasional calls from people concerned over obscene or offensive posts on social media sites. They did not consider the phenomenon a trend.
Franke, coming from the experience of Logan Police Department, sees it a little differently. Times are changing. People are communicating differently, and more social media users are going to result in more social media police calls.
“It may have been telephone harassment or leaving nasty notes on a car or sending things to friends before, but now, instead, they post them on Facebook or they put them on Myspace,” Franke said. “I think we’re just seeing different media for sharing those disputes.”
E-mail: aadams@ksl.com
