I'm going to assume that the general readership of this forum is socially affluent enough to have heard the term "flash mob" before - large groups of people who organize by mass-Internet-communication like Twitter and Facebook walls to all turn up at the same time and place and do something, like dance to cheesy 80s songs or whatever. Bit of a trend that the news loves to throw into their human-interest segment, and now I'm seeing cell-phone commercials capitalizing on the idea as a metaphor for staying informed with their service.
Well, like autodialers, nitroglycerin, and the Internet itself, it didn't take long for a cute idea to turn into crime. Some prime cases:
In Washington D.C., about twenty people loitered outside an upscale clothing store checking their cells, then in synchronicity, walked inside, grabbed armloads of merch, and ran out the door. The one security guard on station couldn't stop the Bums' Rush, and they were long gone by the time police arrived. If you'd like an armchair-Marxists whimsically peabrained call for instating Project Mayhem, and who wouldn't,
here's an "editorial".
In California, a perfectly benign mass basketball tourney was planned in one day in a series of Twitter messages, but some gang members started arguing with each other in the responses. At the big game the next day, about five hundred people turned up, and it didn't take long before someone was shooting.
Three times being a trend,
yesterday in Chicago, four people were mugged in a matter of minutes in a part of town not known for muggings (
or black teenagers). In this case, some of the perps were caught, and revealed that Internet communication played some role. Apparently, it's actually the latest in a series of similar incidents, of spontaneous groups harassing or robbing people and then disappearing. New Mayor Rahm Emmanuel had
some details and a loose plan to deal with the issue, namely by stationing more patrolmen at public transit hubs to look for flash-mobby-type crowds, but that's probably as inane as I'm making it sound.
All these incidents being American, it should be noted that in America, you traditionally have to file with your local police to hold a large gathering. Sure, your right to "peaceably assemble" cannot be "abridged", but you do have to get a permit that it looks peaceful, so appropriate numbers of police, firefighters, and paramedics can be on station in case something bad happens. For crime especially, crowds are a headache - peaceful crowds are prime pickpocket territory, and angry crowds can turn into riots. But a "flash robbery" is basically the worst case scenario for law enforcement. Large numbers of people, who know each other only by hashtags, who can plan a crime in an afternoon with little visible communication; who then descend on a location, demolish it or rob it blind, and scatter in every direction, all in a few minutes. You might think I'm making too much of this, but looking at a success like the D.C. robbery, it's really nothing but a miracle and lack of imagination that climes like that don't happen every day. And short of posting a beat cop at every park and storefront, or science-fiction-scale automated datamining of the entire Internet, it's hard to think of a way to prevent such a crime.
So yeah. Chalk another entry on the gigantic list of "civic rights and privileges screwed up by a few bad apples" for "spontaneous mass gathering". How long did flash mobs take to ruin, about a year or two?
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Topic: Flash Crime (Read 2269 times)