Removing Criminals from Social Media Groups and other Dumb Ideas

Could a simple social media group help recover over 40 stolen vehicles and many other stolen goods in a small city in under 12 months? Could the group also see the police make several arrests while drug mules and low level dealers learned to hate what was happening? Could hundreds and then thousands join the group without any promotion at all? Yes, all of these things can happen. We know it’s possible because they happened to us in Grande Prairie in 2018.

Then in 2019 we spent hours and hours listening to people’s concerns about known criminals in the group. And we removed dozens and kept a list of hundreds. All of the extra effort in this regard in 2019 didn’t really amount to anything. The size of the group grew from about 8,500 to 13,000. The post volume for the most part was the same or higher. The content was still curated and rules were followed. But the results stopped. It was dead.

Work like it was your job

In 2018 I put in 6–15 hour per day ‘hustle’ to help anyone who posted. I also had a lot of part time help. That human element in 2018 was constantly sending private messages, visiting the police station, visiting crime prevention staff, and following up personally with anyone who had experienced a crime. Many times we followed up with anyone who even commented privately. We edited photo’s, wrote posts, edited videos, made videos, hired videos to be made, sent emails, held conferences, met with any business who would meet with us and hustled, hustled, hustled. On family trips my wife would drive while I would often text and call people from the group the whole 5 hours.

And that is how the vehicles got recovered and the items got returned. It was late night chatting with someone we’d never met. It was missing supper and dinner while something ‘live’ was happening and every single post was being curated. It was trying to instantly and always respond the minute we saw a red bell. It was coaching victims and nervous people of what the police needed and what the community would do to help. It was trying to act in a way that people could trust us with confidential information. Like the time I asked one person who was very confident she knew the suspect in the photo, ‘How do you know it’s him?’ She instantly responded “Because he’s the father of my child and he’s a bum and he’s due in court next week to pay child support and I want him arrested!” Now I had to worry about a mother and her child in case this joker came after her.

And we worked hours and hours trying to ensure our members were safe. I never wanted someone to reverse engineer a person’s FB identity and find out where they lived or where they worked. We were constantly asking members who posted if their profile was private and they would be safe with the information posted. When someone did get results we often took the post down right away in case someone could find out the members names who were public and cause them trouble.

And we certainly learned one thing. Facebook as a platform is absolutely stupid for this kind of work. It’s terrible. The whole code base on React native is NOT designed for real time alerts. Sure it looks like you get instant alerts to the casual user but it’s not designed to work that way consistently. Try watching a dozen people post within 30 minutes about a stolen Denali driving through your cities streets and you’ll find there are no instant alerts. It didn’t matter whether it was desktop or mobile, Mac or Windows, Facebook’s alerts don’t work reliably. They stink and because it’s React code that is dual platform for both Android and iOS it will likely always stink for this type of work. And at the worst possible time their ‘algorithm’ will interfere and batch deliver a bunch of alerts that you should have gotten instantly from the community because someone who designed this algorithm thinks by batching a few alerts together it will drive your ‘engagement’.

Let the criminals laugh at each other

We also learned it was a complete and total waste of time to remove people with a criminal record from the group. In fact, I believe it hindered the results. There were times in 2018 when we had lots and lots of criminals as members where vehicles were stolen and then simply abandoned in a residential area while people were posting they knew where it was and were close by. It looked like at least a few times the thief simply gave up because their buddies were telling them it was no use rather than risk arrest. Other times the discomfort level from a low level dealer or mule being exposed was so high they avoided getting posted on the group like a cockroach avoids the light. But when their buddies are all removed who can make fun of them getting caught? The group definitely lost some of it’s ‘venom’ when the privacy settings increased and most of the criminals couldn’t see what was going on.

Anyone who has read about network theory may recognize this is exactly how the US took it to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. They ended up having to use a bigger healthier network to overwhelm Al-Qaeda’s network. At first the US army was getting creamed against what looked like hardly any forces at all. It was like Vietnam all over again. But the top commanding general eventually came up with a strategy to link all sorts of organizations and information flows that normally had never linked with the army before into one giant network. They busted up Al-Qaeda’s network. Eventually the big network that is healthy always just overwhelms the little network. Sorry criminals, it was fun toying with you on social media but we’ve since moved on to more effective forms of misery to come your way. With Lightcatch your welcome to watch as the community puts the spotlight on your actions. You’ll likely never have a clue who just posted that incriminating photo or your latest location. See you in court.

Why keep the Group

We kept the group going because for many months we watched more people use Facebook than the free Lightcatch app that was our new form of criminal torture. Even in our hometown there weren’t that many people who were really interested in supporting a mission like ours just yet. For the vast majority Facebook was easier to use and more entertaining. The app was free like Facebook but it worked worse than Facebook in many respects. So a lot of the public in our home town and in other towns eventually fired the app and re-hired Facebook. I understood why but had to endure a few months of feeling helpless as we had no funds to improve the app. Fortunately, I was able to sell my IT business and use some of the funds to start development back up in Sept 2019.

December — Everything Changed

In mid December of 2019 the usage of the Lightcatch app surpassed the usage of the local Facebook group. It’s been that way ever since. I had a 5 minute mini-celebration with Vadym, the iOS developer, around the 2nd week of Dec when we started to see this take place. We celebrated that the iPhone app no longer stunk. It was fun but it also hurt. Vadym was very confident it still stunk and didn’t want to celebrate at all. But what I saw in the data is that our usage had exploded and we were getting zero complaints. People were voicing by their actions the app didn’t stink on an iPhone by using it more than they ever had before. The three months of hard work Vadym had put in to fix a stinking app was starting to pay off. Meanwhile the Android platform that had been built by Edgar since the beginning rarely crashed and was a much better experience than the iPhone.

Lightcatch is far more effective than social media

By 2019 the group had only recovered 4 stolen vehicles versus the 40+ the year earlier. Almost zero bikes and other stuff had been recovered. I’m very happy for those 4 that did get results but to the many others who tried the group and got nothing it’s not the group. It was the hustle. In 2018 I believed that if I ‘pretended’ the group was as close to the Lightcatch app as I could possibly make it we’d have as close to a test as possible to the real app. And man did results come. We started the group with like 5 people. I hadn’t even owned a Facebook account before Dec 2018 and all the critics laughed that my profile was fake. By April 2018 we’d had so much success there were hundreds joining every week and it felt like it was a public disservice to stop. So we kept hustling. By December 2018 as funds for the app finally came together we just couldn’t afford to keep the hustle up anymore.

We removed one key piece of the group in 2019 and that was the hustle of an active Admin and left everything else the same and the results came crashing down. If anyone tries to create a crime fighting group on social media without this key element I’m pretty confident it won’t work very well. It doesn’t matter what you title the group or who gets involved if you don’t have an active Admin who has a clear vision of how to get results the group won’t go far.

I also apologize to many of those 10,000 people in and around Grande Prairie who had come to believe and trust in the Theft Net Grande Prairie | Lightcatch group. We had to prove to ourselves and others the success in 2018 wasn’t social media and it wasn’t Facebook. The platform made our test possible but it was never the platform. It was about our vision of what the Lightcatch app was going to be like. We proved it in 2019 with more members, less criminals but lousy results.

If you haven’t downloaded the free Lightcatch app yet please do today. If you’re in western Canada did you know 23 of the 30 most dangerous cities in Canada are in the west? We need people like you to get involved on the app for 5 minutes per week. Together we can stop trouble. We’ve proven ourselves, now lets go.