Despite extra staff hours, social media asset for law agencies
By Alexa Zoellner azoellner@dailyunion.com | Posted: Monday, January 22, 2018
Missing stats
Daily Union Facebook post statistics.
Many of the law enforcement agencies in Jefferson County are active on at least Facebook, if not multiple social media platforms.
They use social media to share a wide variety of information, ranging from winter parking notices to community events to press releases seeking help identifying persons of interest in active cases.
“Social media allows us to reach out to a lot more people than what we used to be able to,” Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Patrol Division Capt. Jerry Haferman said. “It has really been a useful tool for us.”
Jefferson Police Department Detective Eric Weiss and Fort Atkinson Police Department Capt. Jeff Davis agreed.
“I think it’s a good open dialogue since it seems like the younger generation, that’s all they want to do is be on social media, so we’re trying to get that information out there,” Weiss said. “In the old days, it used to, obviously, be in the newspaper, but now we’ve got to do the digital aspect of things.
“It gets out there really quickly when it’s an interesting topic citizens want to read about and spread around,” he added. “So it’s a good, useful tool to get more information out there quickly since everyone has a phone in their hand usually these days and that stuff pops up right away and it spreads a lot faster that way.”
A little clue can go a long way, Davis noted.
“Our biggest ally is information and if we can get it from the public, great,” he said. “We can get it from different sources, but the public’s always been great to work with.”
Tips come in more quickly than in days past, when social media wasn’t being used, Weiss pointed out.
“I think we’ve cleared quite a few cases (by posting on social media),” he said. “I can’t say off the top of my head what the percentages are, but we get a lot of immediate (responses). You see a lot of (post) shares and ‘likes’ and things like that real quickly. The Facebook platform reaches a lot of people really quickly.”
That reach is easy to see, especially on posts looking for help identifying individuals.
In scrolling through several local law enforcement agencies Facebook pages, posts seeking help from the public often have hundreds of shares, with the total number of people reached in the thousands.
A Wednesday, Jan. 17, post by the Marshall Police Department asking for help finding Jesse Faber, 21, garnered more than 1,000 shares.
Faber was found murdered the morning of Thursday, Jan. 18. He had been missing since Monday, Jan. 15.
Similarly, a Thursday, Jan. 18, post on the Daily Union Facebook page regarding a missing Fort Atkinson mother and daughter, Lindsay and Lily Harter, reached hundreds of people in just minutes, according to the post statistics.
In about four hours — by which time the pair had been located safely by Wisconsin State Patrol — the post was shared more than 300 times, including by the Fort Atkinson Police Department, and roughly 20,000 people had been reached.
“Working with the Daily Union, I know we share stuff that they might put out and vice versa,” Davis said. “So it works together that way.”
Haferman, Davis and Weiss all said there have been several cases solved in their respective agencies due to tips that came in based on social media posts.
Davis pointed to the case of Corbett G. Ross in 2015 as one such instance.
“(Ross) was a robber and he robbed three gas stations,” Davis explained. “We put his photo out on Facebook and, I want to say the same day, I got a call from somebody saying, ‘This is who it is.’ For sure there’s that case, and I think there’s a couple others out there.”
Haferman cited a fraud complaint that the sheriff’s office posted on its Facebook page as an example.
“We had thousands and thousands of views and shares on it and it was a person that was, like, two counties away that identified the person as their neighbor,” he said.
But as beneficial as social media is for law enforcement, there can be some drawbacks.
“We haven’t experienced many negatives on it except for maybe some negative comments (on the posts) once in a while,” Haferman said. “You usually have a couple people that want to stick a negative comment in there or use profanity. In those types of situations, we just delete (the comment).”
Weiss noted that man hours are added from having to monitoring comments on the agency’s social media platforms to make sure that peoples’ rights are being respected and other crimes aren’t being committed by unauthorized use of the information law enforcement had posted.
“It’s easy for people to type whatever on their phone or their home computer without having to make that impression face to face,” he said. “So, there are lots of hurtful things that could be said that aren’t true and that causes more problems for that person or maybe that case we’re working on.
“It’s having to monitor both sides,” Weiss continued. “We want to get the information out there, but then you have all these people that want to voice their opinions and that can compound problems and make it worse than it really is.”
Davis issued a well-known warning regarding posts and comments on social media: Don’t believe everything you read.
“I’m not saying that private individuals post things all the time that are wrong, but I know that they’re not always right,” Davis said. “When it comes from a law enforcement page or a news media, there’s more of a chance that you can trust what you’re hearing. We verify sources like newspapers do, whereas from a citizen, you can post just about anything you want within the guidelines of the law.”