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I've worked with a few small town USA type law enforcement agencies. No big city ones, so think towns around a few thousand people total, or a county with 15k people total. This won't reflect the majority of the US, but it does seem to reflect the majority of arrests in this location. A lot of criminals (again, around here at least) are that stupid. The detectives have solved many cases just by searching for the suspects name on Facebook. Some examples were: seeing the stolen items right in their profile pic, drugs with the suspect standing there while holding a gun, a video of a friend recording someone breaking into a car, hell, they had to get CPS involved because a parent had a video of them hitting (it was hitting, not disciplining) their own child. All of that just on Facebook. The hardest they had to work to get those pictures was add them as a friend under a fake profile. Now career criminals are a completely different beast. The law enforcement here (luckily) doesn't have many or any "advanced" criminals around here. There are definitely plenty of low hanging fruit here to keep law enforcement busy, and being in small town USA, once they know who you are, they KNOW who you are and who you hang out with. The detectives always said that if most of these people left their phone at home, didn't take any pictures, and didn't tell their friends about what they did, that crime may not get much priority (or any) depending on what the crime was. I don't have raw data to back that up, but it does happen here. I do agree with you about the career criminals though, but there are still A LOT of stupid people out there or maybe it's something in the water here. |