What happens if the flash mobs started drinking Four Loko?

It’s late summer.  The debt ceiling fiasco is over.  Congress is in recess.  It’s hot.  Osama is dead.  We’re bored.  Nobody even remembers what Four Loko was.  Weren’t they an indie band or something?

We need something new to entertain and scare us. 

Media, soil thyself!

Police scramble to fight flash-mob mayhem

This week in Germantown, Maryland, it took less than a minute for a flash mob of teenagers to descend on a 7-Eleven, ransack shelves and make off with hundreds of dollars worth of stuff.

It's going to take much longer for police in Montgomery County to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.

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This summer, spontaneous incidents of group violence -- dubbed "flash robs" -- have happened in Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Washington, among other cities. Most episodes involved groups of young people looting stores or assaulting pedestrians and then running off.

Authorities said they believe at least some of these incidents were triggered by calls on social-networking sites to meet up and wreak havoc, although they cannot say for certain.

Success!

 

The Germantown, Maryland incident was particularly awesome for the late-summer news cycle because it included video.  Really scary video.  Perfect for 30-second spots on the evening news:

 

And borrowing a page from Mitch Albom, here come the scary buzzwords for the baby boomers:

"Part of the challenge is generational. Older officers in management positions -- the ones making decisions -- are often not as savvy as younger officers with social media," said Nancy Kolb, who oversees the International Association of Chiefs of Police's Center for Social Media.

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More than 70% of responding agencies also said they had not identified any goals for officers' use of social-media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, even though the vast majority of law enforcement officers were using them.

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Since the spring of 2010, police have reported a series of violent flash-mob incidents in central Philadelphia. In one episode last year, a crowd of some 200 lawbreakers, mostly teenagers, roamed the streets robbing bystanders and breaking windows. Authorities suspect the group gathered after seeing a call on Facebook or Twitter to meet up.

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Philadelphia police investigators also have been friending younger Philadelphians on Facebook in the hopes of monitoring chatter about potential mayhem.

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Name the social-networking site, and Parker has used it to help track down a criminal or do a background check. The skill he most often teaches other officers is how to recognize a Facebook posting or a Twitter hashtag that suggests flash-mob planning is under way.

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"This is so basic, but if you know there's going to be a dance, you have to get on the invite list," Parker says. "You have to be on these sites -- Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr -- with the mindset that you're not just watching passively. You're engaging."

Social media?  Social networking?  Facebook?  Twitter?  Foursquare?  “Monitoring chatter” like our 14 year olds are in Al Qaeda?  And “hashtag” sounds like either a drug or something that could rip my face open!

The Washington Post has been milking the Germantown incident like an immortal cow (I’m out of similes).  But some of these stories just…didn’t quite make the case.  Example, in a WaPo article rife with chatter about Facebook, Twitter, social networking, and all the good stuff:

In April, about 20 teenagers entered G-Star Raw, a high-end men’s clothing store in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of the District of Columbia, and stole about $20,000 worth of merchandise despite employees’ efforts to grab the apparel back, store manager Greg Lennon said. D.C. police have investigated leads but have not made arrests in the case.

Lennon said he later saw Twitter postings, apparently written after the robbery, that referenced the theft, with one person describing having been in the store and making plans to come back.

That’s…not a flash mob.  That’s a bunch of people stealing stuff at the same time, yes.  But it’s not a “flash mob.”  It might be relevant to the economy, public safety, education, morals, or who-knows-what.  But the fact that somebody Tweeted about stealing stuff from a store after stealing stuff from the store…what does that have to do with anything?  You can’t write thousands of articles with lines like this:

Police in Maryland are not alone in their scramble to find creative, affordable and efficient ways to fight mayhem from flash mobs -- groups of people who gather in one location quickly after being summoned online. Law enforcement in big cities and small towns are all scrambling to, as Smith put it, "catch up with teenagers" when it comes to monitoring crime planning on the Web.

When you drop kinda-sorta-story-destroying disclaimers like this:

Authorities said they believe at least some of these incidents were triggered by calls on social-networking sites to meet up and wreak havoc, although they cannot say for certain.

“Authorities said?”  “They believe?”  “At least some?”  I mean, who are the authorities?  Why do they believe this?  If it’s on a social networking site, shouldn’t it be out in the public domain?  Isn’t this widely available information (and the reason these “mobs” are such a threat)?  And “at least some?”  Well if some of these incidents aren’t examples of “flash mobs,” 1) why the hell were they mentioned in an article on flash mobs, and 2) why are police departments “scrambling” to “monitor crime planning on the web.”  More cops sitting behind computers isn’t exactly the best way to combat, hypothetically, a group of teenagers who spend the night at a fair, take a bus to a transit center, and impulsively – without the aid of any scary “social media” decide to storm a 7-11 and take what they want. 

Or, not hypothetically.  The latest from the Washington Post on the Germantown flash mob:

Although D.C. police have not identified suspects in the latest incidents, Montgomery County police say the group that surged into the Germantown store did not organize over social media.

The participants all had been at the Montgomery County Fair. They traveled by bus to the Germantown Transit Center and, once there, made plans to rush into the store, where they stole about $450 worth of candy, snacks and drinks, according to police.

Which is a little different tune than we were singing last week:

A police report details what happened: Late Friday night (technically Saturday morning), 30 kids walked into a 7-Eleven and stole items including snack food and drinks. The group stayed in the store for approximately one minute and then exited, also as a group. Many of the suspects had covered their faces with items of clothing.

Hersh said his team does not know how the heist originated, but said it seems obvious that it was coordinated via cellphone or social media. As to whether the kids arrived via foot or car, he said, the answer is one of those the investigation seeks to determine.

But hey, never let facts get in the way of a good scare, amiright?