An 11-year-old girl is kidnapped by a stranger walking home from school in Queens, NY. She doesn't know what's going on, why she was snatched or where she is going but she has one chance to get a message out. She's smart enough to know that sending a text to...

One thing you can say about the bad guys is that they're no slouches when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest in technology. Phishers and hackers are almost as old as the Internet itself. Small wonder then that socially minded criminal organizations gravitate toward social networking...

This is Part 2 of a two-part post on Toronto Traffic Control Officer, Sergeant Tim Burrows who has used social media to help his department distribute information relating to traffic control and safety in and around the city. Read part 1 here.

When traffic control officer...

Police seem to have intentionally selective memory, a trait I must I share with them because it's something my wife accuses me of all the time. It's not really that they don't know or don't remember things. They've been trained to be observant, to see details that many of us...

Sergeant Tim Burrows doesn't just think of the old police adage, "To Serve And Protect," as lip service. It's the inspiration for his use of social media in community outreach and fuels the passion to always be a better cop. He also thinks that using his resources to be a...

The volcanic islands of Hawaii are unique in that they're so isolated from any other land mass that any early flora or fauna that existed there is said to have been deposited by the three Ws: wind, waves and wings. Those same waves brought Polynesians to the islands more than...

A bellwether of the increasing popularity of social media's usage in law enforcement is the fact that there's now a conference planned to address the theme - an SXSW for 5-0 if you will.

According to Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications and organizer...

The Broward Sheriff's Office (BSO) is the 3rd largest sheriff's office in the nation with four divisions including a Department of Law Enforcement, a Fire Rescue division, a Detention/Community Control center and of course an Administration office. In all they employ about 6,000 people and service 1.8 million...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic has documents that outline the use of social media by government agencies in investigations from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division. These documents are being released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case the organizations...