Police Departments from San Francisco to Pottstown, Penn. have begun using the image-sharing platform Pinterest to track down criminals, using it as a sort of digital replacement for the Post Office wall.
Departments making forays into social media began dabbling in the service, whose largely female audience has made it best known, perhaps, for wedding planning, as one of a range of tools aimed primarily at public relations and at generalized community outreach. But the service’s image-centric interface has turned it into a tool for solving serious crimes as well.
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Cops’ experimentation with Pinterest appears, like the service itself, to have grown up outside of the elite cities and high-profile departments like New York and Los Angeles. The Pinterest policing pioneers are lower-profile cities in the middle of the country, places like Kansas City, Mo.—whose police department appears to have been the first on Pinterest—and Pottstown, Penn (pop. 22,377), thirty miles outside Philadelphia.
A glance at Pottstown’s page, hosted by a local newspaper, The Mercury shows the intense engagement, with comments ranging from “holys**t! I think this was my babysitter from when I was younger” to very specific addresses and times and dates of their last sightings.
Read more at BuzzFeed.
