Friday, September 11, 2009

Crowdsourcing the Detectives, Don't Get Cute...

Vic Mackey's guide to sensitive policing

Crowdsourcing (My jaded adman definition: getting gullible people to gather together and do shit for you unpaid) is very popular these days. If you go to Mashable and other social media news sites, you’ll see dozens of examples of how brands have used the concept, turning their punters into productivity/promotional drones.

Now my recent viewing of three Shield boxed sets has given me a great idea. You can have it for free…

A cop in the Shield tells a victim that any crime can be solved, it’s just question of what resources you can afford to throw at it. This gave me the idea of crowdsourcing detective work.

Let’s call it ‘copsourcing’.

Basically you create a site that oursources the mundane aspects of an investigation to eager ghoulish punters, portioning out fragments of evidence via an online hub. This might consist of reviewing a portion of CCTV footage, reviewing phone records or looking over financial statements. You’d get the server to break up the evidence so that the amateur detective wouldn’t be able to identify the case or the name of the suspect.

This started off as a joke during a meeting, but the more I think about it, the more of a good idea it seems. I expect a fat consultant’s fee from the Met very soon…

3 comments:

Steve said...

Great idea. And when the cops gun down some innocent bystander on the underground we can all take the blame...

Tristan said...

Ha! The Met would LOVE that!

Rich Martin said...

I never thought of you as a Camron man. I expect to see your reassuring features on the telly with a title "Government community policing tsar" within the month.