Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter

Most street gang members use Twitter to intimidate others, to present outrageous images and statements to the world, and to share recent illegal activities. Their tweets may thus be useful to law enforcement agencies to discover clues about recent crimes or to anticipate ones that may occur. Finding these posts, however, requires a method to discover gang member Twitter profiles. This is a challenging task since gang members represent a very small population of the 320 million Twitter users. This paper studies the problem of automatically finding gang members on Twitter. It outlines a process to curate one of the largest sets of verifiable gang member profiles that have ever been studied. A review of these profiles establishes differences in the language, images, YouTube links, and emojis gang members use compared to the rest of the Twitter population. Features from this review are used to train a series of supervised classifiers. Our classifier achieves a promising F1 score with a low false positive rate.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, Published as a full paper at 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016

Gang Violence and Social Media

The increasing permeation of social media into people’s daily lives is playing an important role in (re)shaping attitudes and behaviours (Annisette & Lafreniere, 2016; Greenfield, 2014). Whilst online activity has huge potential to enhance the quantity and quality of communication between people across the world, it is also raising some serious challenges. This chapter focuses on one of these challenges in particular, namely, the links between gang-related activity in the virtual world and gang-related violence in the real world

Where\u27s the Beef? How Chicago Gang Members Utilize Social Media to Promote Beefs and Incite Gang Violence and Gang Murders

This is a literature review about how gang members utilize social media to incite gang violence offline to assist in the creation of a new special unit of the Chicago Police Department that will work together with gang violence prevention/gang violence reduction organizations to assist in reducing gang conflict/gang violence created on social media. There are studies that focus on how gang members use social media. The literature focuses on different aspects of how gang members and gangs use social media. “Internet banging” or “cyber banging” is a form of gang banging but on social media platforms. “Internet banging” or “cyber banging” is used to threat, provoke, and taunt rival gang members and gangs. “Internet banging” or “cyber banging” can incite violent reactions when gang members are responding and replying to each other on the internet. This can also lead to violence on the street. This literature review will describe and explain how gang members utilize social media to incite gang violence and gang murders offline and how can we use social media and other alternatives to prevent gang violence. In my research I have conducted a literature review of case studies regarding “internet banging” or “cyber banging”, how gangs and gang members use social media to “gang bang”, how has social media changed the way gangs interact or conduct gang actions, and how the Chicago Police Department polices social media

Re-Spatializing Gangs: An Exponential Random Graph Model of Twitter Data to Analyze the Geospatial Distribution of Gang Member Connections

Gang studies often use location-based approaches to explain gang members’ interconnectedness. Although this perspective remains consistent with the proximity principle that the smaller the geographic space, the greater the likelihood of observing connections between individuals, location-based studies limit our understanding of gang member connections to narrowly defined geographic spaces at specific points in time. The advent of social media has re-spatialized gang member interconnectedness to unbounded geographic spaces, where the preservation of online activity can extend indefinitely. Despite having an online presence, most research examining the digital footprint of gangs tends to be descriptive. This study collects Twitter data to analyze the geospatial distribution of gang member connections using an exponential random graph model (ERGM) of location homophily. An ERGM analyzes network substructures to determine the patterns of relationships between vertices. In this case, the extent to which homophily by city, state, and gang affiliation determine gang member connections. The results of this study support the proximity principle but challenge the assertion that gangs are strictly localized

Re-Spatializing Gangs in the United States: An Analysis of Macro- and Micro-Level Network Structures

Despite the significant contributions from location-based gang studies, the network structure of gangs beyond localized settings remains a neglected but important area of research to better understand the national security implications of gang interconnectivity. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the network structure of gangs at the macro- and micro-level using social network analysis. At the macro-level, some gangs have formed national alliances in perpetuity with their goals and objectives. In order to study gangs at the macro-level, this research uses open-source data to construct an adjacency matrix of gang alliances and rivalries to map the relationships between gangs and analyze their network centrality across multiple metrics. The results suggest that native gangs are highly influential when compared to immigrant gangs. Some immigrant gangs, however, derive influence by “bridging” the gap between rival gangs. Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations (MDTOs) play a similar role and feature prominently in the gang network. Moreover, removing MDTOs changes the network structure in favor of ideologically-motivated gangs over profit-oriented gangs. Critics deride macro-level approaches to studying gangs for their lack of national cohesion. In response, this research includes a micro-level analysis of gang member connections by mining Twitter data to analyze the geospatial distribution of gang members and, by proxy, gangs, using an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to test location homophily and better understand the extent to which gang members are localized. The findings show a positive correlation between location and shared gang member connections which is conceptually consistent with the proximity principle. According to the proximity principle, interpersonal relationships are more likely to occur in localized geographic spaces. However, gang member connections appear to be more diffuse than is captured in current location-based gang studies. This dissertation demonstrates that macro- and micro-level gang networks exist in unbounded geographic spaces where the interconnectivity of gangs transpose local issues onto the national security consciousness which challenges law and order, weakens institutions, and negatively impacts the structural integrity of the state

The Use of Social Media by Alleged Members of Mexican Cartels and Affiliated Drug Trafficking Organizations

Focusing on Mexican cartels and affiliated drug trafficking organizations, this article examines how self-proclaimed cartel members use social media to further the criminal activities of their organizations. Employing an opensource, intelligence-driven methodology, the authors identified, followed, and mapped the connections between and among 75 alleged cartel members over a period of 4 months. Results indicated that cartel members actively use Facebook to plan, organize, and communicate in real-time. These findings provide tentative validation to the utility of using open-source social media platforms to study the social structure and operations of Mexican drug cartels. Implications for law enforcement, homeland security, and the intelligence enterprise are discussed

On the Relevance of Social Media Platforms in Predicting The Volume and Patterns of Web Defacement Attacks

Social media platforms are commonly employed by law enforcement agencies for collecting Open Source Intelligence (OSNIT) on criminals, and assessing the risk they pose to the environment the live in. However, since no prior research has investigated the relationships between hackers’ use of social media platforms and their likelihood to generate cyber-attacks, this practice is less common among Information Technology Teams. Addressing this empirical gap, we draw on the social learning theory and estimate the relationships between hackers’ use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and the frequency of web defacement attacks they generate in different times (weekdays vs. weekends) and against different targets (USA vs. non-USA websites). To answer our research questions, we use hackers’ reports of web defacement they generated (available on http://www.zone-h.org), and complement with an independent data collection we launched to identify these hackers’ use of different social media platforms. Results from a series of Negative Binomial Regression analyses reveal that hackers’ use of social media platforms, and specifically Twitter and Facebook, significantly increases the frequency of web defacement attacks they generate. However, while using these social media platforms significantly increases the volume of web defacement attacks these hackers generate during weekdays, it has no association with the volume of web defacement they launch over weekends. Finally, although hackers’ use of both Facebook and Twitter accounts increase the frequency of attacks they generate against non-USA websites, the use of Twitter only increases significantly the volume of web defacement attacks against USA websites

Understanding the Relationship Between Black Chicago Youth and Chicago Drill Music Culture

Chicago is most noted as a beautiful, Midwestern city, set to the backdrop of Lake Michigan, with skyscrapers and the bustling energy of the downtown Magnificent Mile. The “Tale of Two Cities,” Chicago is a city full of hope, opportunity, and potential for some, but a city plagued with poverty, violence, disinvestment, and hopelessness for others. There has been a significant increase in the awareness of the violence happening across Chicago. The emergence of social media has provided a direct and unfiltered view of the reality of violence the city has faced on an ongoing basis. Crimes such as shootings, carjacking, and gang violence are constantly thrust into the spotlight and often captured and discussed in mainstream and social media. The internet has become an essential aspect of everyday life for most of us. The explosion of social media and music/video streaming platforms has created a means by which Black Chicago youth capture the realities of their world. The virtual world of likes, shares, and hashtags has created an algorithm, leading viewers a few short clicks away from experiencing the “Ghettaverse,” an immersive virtual experience of poverty, violence, and gang life in Chicago. The popularity of likes and shares combined with a global hunger for ghetto and poverty voyeurism has created a path for the poorest residents of Chicago from the most adversely impacted communities to derive a strategy to reap benefits from the digital economy. Black Chicago youth are sharing “hood” stories and experiences with millions of individuals worldwide through music and video streaming. Black Chicago youth have gained worldwide notoriety for creating Chicago drill music. The qualitative data for this study suggest that Black Chicago youth engage in creating and listening to navigate the poverty and violence experienced in their environment. This study led to the understanding of how Black Chicago youth engage in Chicago drill music culture as a way to interpret their experiences while amplifying their voices to meet their own needs

Community experiences of organised crime in Scotland

The research explored community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland (SOC). The report provides information on the nature and extent of the impact of SOC on everyday life in the community, as well as offering suggestions for policy development. The study sought to answer the following questions: 1)What are the relationships that exist between SOC and communities in Scotland? 2)What are the experiences and perceptions of residents, stakeholders and organisations of the scope and nature of SOC within their local area? and 3)How does SOC impact on community wellbeing, and to what extent can the harms associated with SOC be mitigated