Are Your Children Being Recruited By Gangs Online?

Posted by Anthony LaFauce on February 13th, 2008 8:31 PM

We have all seen it, kids go online, ad an interesting picture on their social network or download a song highlighting street violence. According to a CBS affiliate website gangs are turning to Youtube and other social networks to find new gang members.

The disturbing article by Joe Vazquez interviewed several teens hanging out in front of a movie theater on a Friday night. The teens spoke about how they add gang logos and songs to their online profiles and were soon approached by gang members.

One teenager said the possible gang members simply ask him what he is up to and try to start a dialog with him. What this teen doesn’t understand is that this is how criminal recruiting works. Start a simple dialog, befriend and create trust, then move the target on to some simple crimes to begin the snow ball of primal world.

Vazquez’s article references an anonymous spokesperson at YouTube that states that YouTube actively removes and responds to flagged illegal content. I wonder if it is even possible to flag something as illegal activity any more. The types of tools that these gang recruiters appear harmless at first sight.

Can YouTube even monitor for these thing? Can social networks start to actively ban gang insignia found online? I think the problem of gang recruiting could be a much larger problem for social networks than child sex predators.

Think about it. It is possible to identify and criminalize people who perpetrate sex youth crimes. Finding a gang member who is simply cultivating sympathy for criminal behavior is much more difficult, you can exactly arrest someone for posting a digital representation of a gang sign on their web page.

As criminals become more tech savvy both parents and police are going to have to find new ways to monitor and protect their children. The first step in this fight is education. Police need to take the offensive and hold seminars and online sessions that parents can log into and find out what all of these tags and gang signs mean.

I am the son of a New York City police officer. I have the utmost respect and admiration for law enforcement officials. I would like to see nothing more than police jurisdictions taking the lead in educating parents on how best to protect their children online from criminal behavior.

Do you have any input on how we could teach children to be wary of this new form of criminal predator? Should social networks monitor for gang signs and gang related videos? Who’s job is it to protect our children?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.