Police Using Social Media Posts to Determine “Threat Score” of Suspects

By Paul Watson
Prison Planet

Police departments across the United States are now using a program that mines Internet comments and social media posts to determine the “threat score” of a suspect before cops arrive on the scene.

Reuters reports that law enforcement authorities have utilized an application called Beware since 2012 that takes just seconds to crawl billions of records in commercial and public databases to assign a threat rating to an individual – green, yellow or red.

“Yet it does far more — scanning the residents’ online comments, social media and recent purchases for warning signs. Commercial, criminal and social media information, including, as Intrado vice president Steve Reed said in an interview with urgentcomm.com, “any comments that could be construed as offensive,” all contribute to the threat score.”

The program also “allows the routine code enforcement of a nanny state,” allowing homeowners who have failed to trim their trees to be targeted, as well as being used for fishing expeditions and revenue generation.

An annual subscription to Beware costs police departments around $36,000 dollars a year, the majority of which is covered by federal grants. The program represents another step towards “predictive policing,” with the report noting that one recent speaker at a national law enforcement conference “compared future police work to Minority Report, the Tom Cruise film set in 2054 Washington, where a “PreCrime” unit has been set up to stop murders