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Gangs and Social Media
Assessing Online Gang Activity to Protect Communities
and Schools
KEY POINTS
•Gang members use publicly available social media to sell drugs and weapons, threaten or harass rival gang
members, and even brag about crimes.
•Increasingly, gang related online disagreements are ending in violence offline and result in school
disturbances.
•A hit-or-miss monitoring strategy is ineffective because gangs often quickly pull down online posts. Instead,
a formal and consistent social media threat alert program is needed to effectively address safety issues
associated with online gang activity.
DID YOU KNOW
It is estimated that
gang members commit up to
80%
of all violent crimes in the US 1
1,000,000+
American youth are gang
members, according to a
2015 study published in the
Journal of Adolescent Health?
According to the FBI, gangs
are a “significant presence”
in schools at every level, from
elementary to college.
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Although they represent a very small percentage of the population, it is
estimated that gang members commit up to 80% of all violent crimes
in the US.1 For public safety teams, anticipating, and interrupting gangrelated crime is therefore a paramount concern. Increasingly, they are
turning to publicly available social media to help.
Studies show that gang members often have a strong online presence
and are technologically savvy. They use publicly available social media
to sell drugs and weapons, threaten or harass rival gang members and
other individuals (known as “beefing”), maintain their turf, monitor the
movement of police and rivals so that they can target them physically,
and post violent videos that endorse and perpetuate dangerous activity.
Their postings sometimes stay online just long enough to bring about
the desired outcome, and then disappear. Increasingly, gangs’ activity
on social media, sometimes referred to as “technological kerosene,” is
fueling real-world violence.
1
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-01-29-ms13_N.htm
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“Most people are
online. This includes
criminals and gang
members. 21st century
proactive policing is
more than just walking
the streets. Today,
maintaining public safety
has to involve an active
online presence.”
One example is the Chicago rapper Young Pappy (real name Shaquon
Thomas) who posted numerous videos in which he rapped about shooting
gang rivals. Allegedly the target of a number of retaliatory shootings that
killed bystanders, he was finally murdered in May of 2015, a week after
making fun of a rival gang online.
— Detective Corporal
Thomas Nash, Burlington
Police Department, Vermont
Internet Crimes Unit
Like their non-gang member peers, young gang members are online
“constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center. But in addition to
posting selfies and harmless tweets, they use social media for the same
purposes that older members do: to recruit, document crimes committed,
threaten rivals, and sell dangerous drugs and contraband, posing
imminent threat to others.
Gangs and Schools
Over one million American youth are gang members, according to a 2015
study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. And according to
the FBI, gangs are a “significant presence” in schools at every level, from
elementary to college.
Increasingly, gang-related online disagreements, which often happen
during the school day, are ending in violence offline. In fact, the Chicago
police department (which patrols social media) estimates that 80 percent
of all school disturbances are the result of online exchanges.2
Authorities aware of these online exchanges can help deter further
violence. In 2013, a Chicago middle-school student posted insults
directed at Rapper Chief Keef and the Black Disciples gang in a rap
video. Reading the comments, the city’s gang unit school-safety team
leader could see that Keef supporters were getting angry and were close
to committing real-world violence. The police notified the boy’s family, and
he was relocated.
Using Social Sentinel
Threat alerts received via the Social Sentinel service help public safety
teams and school officials to be aware of, de-escalate, and interrupt
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802-861-1375 | www.socialsentinel.com
2
http://www.wired.com/2013/09/gangs-of-social-media/
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gang activity. Without it, a hit-or-miss monitoring strategy is typically used
which can result in overly broad searches, inappropriate targeting, and
ineffective information gathering.
A 2014 LexisNexis study titled “Social Media Use in Law Enforcement”
revealed that while 67% of public safety teams indicate that social media
monitoring is a valuable process in anticipating crimes, researchers
have also found that law enforcement perceives monitoring it by hand is
a “tedious and inexact process.”3 Without formal methods, all available
information is not captured, and that information is not collected or updated
at regular intervals. Especially when collecting evidence, timeliness and
preservation is crucial. Gangs often quickly pull down online posts, so
what is visible during one monitoring session could be gone a few minutes
later.
Find threats with the Social
Sentinel service and then take
action to diffuse the situation.
3
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3
http://knoesis.wright.edu/researchers/sanjaya/papers/2015/Wijeratne_ISI_2015.pdf
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Social Sentinel can help by sending alerts in near real time that indicate
when dangerous public safety issues may occur or are escalating and
where suspects, witnesses, or victims are located. Receiving alerts to
threats of harm or imminent public safety issues rather than performing
broad monitoring helps ensure safety teams are not going on fishing
expeditions or inappropriately targeting individuals or issues. And when
chatter trending indicates the potential for violence or harm, a social
threat alert service can alert public safety teams and school officials who
can get on-the-ground teams out, ready to respond appropriately to the
anticipated situation.
Take Action:
• Establish a social media threat alert procedure for your organization that includes identifying an
individual or group responsible for receiving and analyzing gang-related social media alerts and
sharing information with others on a timely basis.
• Develop and maintain a list of known gang terms in your area including names, aliases used on- and
offline, names of leaders if known, and territories. Incorporate these terms into your social media threat
alert strategy with Social Sentinel’s Local+™ feature.
• Stick to receiving alerts to safety and security issues. Broad keyword searches or monitoring is not
advised as it could lead to fishing expeditions or inappropriate targeting.
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