By Detective Robert Kemmet
Oklahoma City Police Department
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This French proverb has been used many times to point to the lack of real difference in even revolutionary shifts in reality. No more complete a shift in human relationships can be imagined than that which we have witnessed in the last several years. The majority of modern population has adopted an entirely new mode of communication and interaction through the virtual web of applications and utilities that greet them on the internet. The innovations we have seen update and improve so rapidly that society has had little time to digest any single milestone before it is either duplicated exponentially or evaporates into obsolescence. The “change” is massive, and moving at the speed of thought.
Virtual reality is easy to dismiss as just a mode of communication having limited need to be addressed by law enforcement. This is a mistake in several ways. First, the integration of virtual existence into “real” life has been pervasive. People aren’t just communicating. They are interacting in a virtual environment. Every aspect of life has come to have a virtual component and it is hard to imagine the loss of such intertwined reality. What is telling in this is the fact that the vernacular of the virtual world is geographic rather than typographic. We use terms like “address, path, route, and site” as we describe the “navigation” of the virtual part of our world. We see the internet more as a place and we act accordingly.
But if there is a place, and in this place there are people, then crime is sure to follow.
In just a few short years we have seen every kind of crime begin to have a cyber component. While sexual predators and white collar financial crimes are the easiest to conceptualize, they are just a fraction of the overall criminal picture that faces us. Every type of crime can be seen to have a virtual element and every law enforcement entity must be ready to operate on the electronic paths of their virtual jurisdiction with the same confidence and competence that they exhibit on the concrete of their real world streets. The public has been patient in allowing us to catch up, but they want their virtual lives and they want them to be safe. They will look to us to make them so, just as they expect us to keep them safe in their homes. Luckily the answer is far simpler than we have been making it.
The key to addressing the changing environment is to make sure that we do not stray too far from the concepts of law that we already know. It is tempting to use the excuse that legislation has not “caught up” to the virtual venue, but that is also a myopic mistake. If the virtual world is seen as just another location where citizens interact then the job is simply to apply the same standards to crime that occurs there that we would in any other location.
The easiest way to think of it is to realize that a crime in the real world is also a crime in the virtual world. Conversely, an interaction that is not criminal in the real world does not become so just because it occurred in virtual space. Once you adopt that premise it becomes easy to apply traditional law enforcement tactics to the issues at hand. Hundreds of years of police method need not be reinvented for the new frontier as long as we see it for what it is...just another precinct. The first step is to adopt a geographic concept of your virtual city. Know where your people are and apply resources accordingly.
Thus certain virtual venues will rate more attention than others and this will vary over time. Social networks and utilities will require a more general police presence than niche circles based on the same principals used to assign patrol assets to neighborhoods. A large social network becomes your biggest cyber “district”, but is no more the whole of the city than any one neighborhood or subdivision. Conceptualize a map of the city that divides the cyber neighborhoods in geo-populous proportions just like patrol districts.
Once the geographic concept is adopted the next step is to create a recognizable police presence. The public in your jurisdiction are comfortable when they are engaged in real world interaction with your department based on their easy recognition of legitimate law enforcement through uniform appearance.
The department’s virtual existence should follow the same guidelines. The mode, appearance, and method of officer interaction with the public in the virtual jurisdiction should be just a stringently adhered to as it is in the real world. This increases public confidence while dramatically decreasing the vicarious liability of the department for a failure to be available, accessible, and competent.
Finally, fully invest officers with the same comfort in their authority and responsibility in virtual environments that you give them in real world venues. Once the mechanism exists it is easy to train officers to apply the same knowledge, training, and experience that they already possess. The need for them to be fully versed in the technology that allows them to operate there should not be an obstacle. It is not necessary for an officer to be an accomplished auto mechanic before they operate a patrol car, they just need to know how to drive. The same applies to a virtual environment.
We don’t need them to be experts in computer technology, they just need to know how to get there. Once they are engaged they should act and react with the same modalities they would on any other street.
While it is true that the world has changed the needs of the public have not. It is possible for modern law enforcement to address those needs while retaining the knowledge centuries of public safety has produced. The streets may change, but the police must stay the same.
