Police Dept. to Use Internet to Try to Stop Mass Shootings
Top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department met on Thursday to examine ways to search the Internet to identify potential “deranged” gunmen before they strike, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.
Context & Ripple Effects
The department had already created a social-media unit to mine Facebook and Twitter in 2011. The officials' meeting extends that monitoring effort from tracking mayhem toward identifying potential attackers before an incident.
Kelly described an examination of Internet-search methods, not a deployed system. The distinction matters: the NYPD is testing whether broad online signals can support a narrowly consequential policing decision.
First-order effects
- NYPD intelligence officials must turn the proposed Internet-search approach into criteria for flagging and escalating potential threats; the reported meeting does not establish that searches are in use.
- Raymond W. Kelly and the department take responsibility for defining how an online lead becomes an actionable police intervention rather than an intelligence record.
Second-order effects
- The NYPD's existing social-media operation becomes the practical base for any broader threat-identification effort, shifting its work from collection toward triage and referral.
- Internet platforms and people whose posts are reviewed become part of the department's threat-screening workflow, increasing the importance of how ambiguous online language is interpreted.
Third-order effects
- If the NYPD operationalizes the approach, preventive policing will move further from investigating completed offenses toward assessing risk from digital behavior, with accuracy and intervention standards becoming central institutional questions.
The trend: Police intelligence work is broadening from social-media monitoring to attempts at preemptive threat detection from online signals.