US law enforcement agencies are a long way from being able to effectively track threats of the kind a gunman posted on Instagram before his execution-style murder of two New York City policemen last weekend. Police need more data analytics and mining software to monitor social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter , as well as trained personnel to make sense of what could be a deluge of data, say law enforcement officials and security experts.
"You can buy all the technology you want, but if you want to figure out clever stuff, you better have smart people able to use it," said Christopher Ahlberg, co-founder of Recorded Future Inc, which helps clients analyse social media feeds.
The company is partly backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that serves US intelligence agencies. According to the New York Police Department, Ismaaiyl Brinsley posted anti-cop slurs on the Instagram photo-sharing site hours before walking up to two officers in a parked squad car in Brooklyn and shooting them dead on Saturday.
Baltimore police said they discovered the Instagram posts after Brinsley shot and wounded his girlfriend earlier that day. But the NYPD did not learn of the posts - which included a photograph of a silver handgun and the message "I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today.
They Take 1 Of Ours...Let's Take 2 of Theirs" - until it was too late. Monitoring social media for out-of-the-blue threats may be beyond the capabilities of most police forces including even the New York Police Department, which has a relatively extensive and aggressive intelligence operation, experts say.
Analysts at the New York and Los Angeles police departments routinely crawl through social media to keep tabs on individuals on their radar, such as gang members, or to prepare for high-profile events.
But in an era of shrinking or stagnant budgets, buying high-end software and hiring trained data analysts can be costly. Many police departments utilise fairly rudimentary tools.