Semi-Organized Crime: The Dark Side of Crowdsourcing

In a recent Microtask post, Tommaso De Benetti calls to memory the heart-pounding scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker essentially crowdsources crime by going on TV and threatening to blow up a hospital unless a particular person is killed. De Benetti ponders the ramifications; could real-life crime be crowdsourced in a similar fashion? He offers two scenarios he thinks could be effective.

The first method is pretty much the real-world application of Joker’s ultimatum; a cyber-terrorist posts on Facebook (for example) that they will blow up the Eiffel Tower unless everyone goes to Website X and donates $5 to him. He describes it accurately as “a cross between crowdfunding site Kickstarter and those absurd guilt-trip chain emails”, but would it work? Probably not. Joker’s ruse was successful for two reasons:

1. He’s the Joker. When he says he’s going to blow up a hospital, people tend to believe him. Random Facebook poster? Probably not going to get as much credibility. He’d have to prove he’s capable of such a thing, and in doing that he would most likely attract law enforcement attention, nipping the whole thing in the bud.
2. He was on Gotham TV. Joker knew his audience. His message was targeted towards a scared, doubtful audience, one that had already put very little faith in traditional methods of keeping the peace. In the real world, a message like this hits a much different crowd, and we probably can’t expect the reaction to be similar. Someone who actually believes this terrorist’s message (see point #1) is more likely to simply call the cops or FBI than actually donate their hard-earned and scarce funds.

De Benetti’s second method, however, has already seen some success. It involves using an online medium to organize a mass robbery of a certain store. The organizer offers to buy the loot, and the crowd organizes their own lookouts, getaway vehicles, and systems to decide who gets a cut of what. We’ve seen this in small-scale with flash robberies. If a mob was to collaborate to attempt a bigger heist, they certainly have the tools to do so, but at a certain point it seems bound to collapse on itself; all you need is one miscommunication or stool pigeon, and suddenly your big heist has no getaway cars. Or worse, the police are waiting for you when you arrive.

Your crowdsourced mafia’s welcoming party.

The best example of real-world crowdsourced crime that I can think of is Anonymous’ DDoS raids of various websites. While it equates to little more than Internet vandalism, the heart of crowdsourcing is absolutely present here. This is a group that anyone can join, organized grassroots-style, which has no leader and its participants have no illusions of personal glory. Their actions are for a cause they see as righteous and use methods that could only be accomplished by a large group of loosely-organized individuals. Nothing more crowdsource-y than that.

Do you think crime can be crowdsourced? Tell me in the comments how you’d build your own ground-up crime syndicate.

Crowdsourcing Solves a Murder Mystery

Photo Credit: Waynesboro Police Department

When 57-year-old Betty Wheeler was hit by a car and killed a few weeks ago, police knew the chances of finding the perpetrators were slim. The only evidence the driver left was the shard of metal you see above, which had broken off in the collision. Car parts are notoriously difficult to identify, what with the vast numbers of makes and models available, many made with similar-looking parts. So without a good way for the police to find the specific car this piece came from, they turned to the crowd.

Automotive news site Jalopnik picked up the story, and urged readers to help. And help they did; the comments section exploded with helpful automotive gurus who practically clambered over each other to identify this piece. And in a matter of days, one vigilant commenter correctly identified the part as belonging to a Ford F-150. Although a common truck, this identification helped police narrow their search, and it was only a matter of time before they located the vehicle that had a chunk missing in the exact size and shape of this broken metal shard. Truly, a film noir Cinderella story.

None of us are as smart (or dumb!) as all of us, so stories like these are a great example of how a team can use crowdsourcing to add to their available knowledge base. Without the vast and deep knowledge the crowd possessed, police may have never located the perpetrators of this heinous crime. The takeaway lesson: when a project requires specific, detailed knowledge of one particular thing, crowdsourcing essentially provides a library of research, conveniently mobilized because it happens to be attached to five thousand dedicated individuals.

Facewatch: Crowdsourced Crimefighting Revisited

© Penny Matthews

Do you remember that story arc in the Batman/Superman comic (#53-56) where they switched powers, and Batman went kinda nuts because he finally had the ability to fight every crime? No? It’s a good one, look it up.

My point is this: if Batman can’t be everywhere at once, the police definitely can’t. This is why we see platforms like iPaidABribe and the Syrian Sexual Assault Crowdmap; the crowd can be the eyes for the police and fill in where the normal service may not be enough.

This is the drive behind Facewatch, which seeks to reduce some of the petty crimes that business owners may experience. These crimes, the website claims, are small, committed serially, and recurring, meaning that they bleed the company over a long time and are very difficult to catch. Facewatch speeds up the process by allowing businesses to submit their crime evidence (victim statements, CCTV footage and stills) directly to the police instead of filing an official report and waiting.

After the victim reports the crime, Facewatch goes a few steps further to help ensure it is solved and won’t happen again. They circulate images of the perpetrator to local businesses and industry networks, since many criminals use the same tactics on multiple locations. For the victim, Facewatch provides an instant crime reference number for insurance, email updates about the status of the case, and a one-phone-call process to cancel and replace any stolen cards.

As the brand becomes more fleshed out, simply having a “Facewatch” sticker on an establishment’s window will deter crime. And while it’s great to see places like Africa, Syria, and India embrace citizen police work, it’s good to see it being applied to a context the average American can relate to a little more strongly. Anyone who has had their wallet lifted has wished there was a better way to recover it; now there is.

Women Under Siege: Crowdsourcing Anti-Violence in Syria

It wasn’t too long ago that iPaidABribe focused its sights on crooked officials, showing us that focusing on the individual is a good way to call attention to an issue that is usually reduced to a statistic. This is the driving force behind the Women Under Siege Crowdmap, where citizens can cultivate, categorize and document reports of sexual assault on a navigable map of Syria. The victims themselves, or any witnesses, are encouraged to (anonymously) contribute to the map to find crimes the news reports miss.

The aim of this is two-pronged. First is to put a face on these heinous crimes. It’s easy to say “oh yeah, rape is a problem in Syria, we should do something about that,” but when you have the intimate stories of a dozen women in a particular town who have been assaulted, it puts a finer point on the issue. These are now people, instead of simply numbers, and there is a more personal level added to the issue.

And speaking of numbers, the crime of rape itself is woefully under-reported in Syria. In America and the UK, there were 29.3 and 23.7 rapes reported in 2010 per hundred thousand people, respectively. Compare this to Syria, with its rate of 0.7 per hundred thousand, and it’s extremely obvious that the vast majority of rapes go unreported. This crowdmap provides a tangible account not only of the occurrences themselves, but geographic and severity data, and the level of anonymity means that victims can feel secure in submitting their data and then immediately see how it will be used to help prevent further incidents.

Social media is all about putting power in the hands of the people who previously had none. There is no better use for it than to keep said people safe and free from harm instead of defenseless.