Street Gangs Use Twitter [New York Gangs Using Twitter To Coordinate Violence, Police Trying To Keep Up]

In a report in the New York Daily News, New York Street gangs have made the jump to Twitter. These gangs are reportedly using Twitter for ‘shout-outs and throwdowns’, as they will call out rival gangs, inspiring more street violence in the process.

The NYPD is claiming that recent gang crimes, including a boy shot in the leg last week, were started or inflated over messages exchanged over Twitter. The gang members aren’t really technophiles, they just see Twitter as another form of communication.

The NYPD is saying that the public nature of tweets is making gang flare-ups worse because all gang members can potentially see threats and taunts that members would make to each other. When the Daily News asked a gang member about police or rival gangs watching their tweets, he replied that “Our page is private”.

But police are following the tweets. The NYPD is using the tweets to attempt to prevent the violence, or, if they can’t stop it, use it to investigate the crimes. A Harlem pastor who runs a youth program in the city uses Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites to monitor ‘at-risk’ teenagers.

The pastor told the Daily News that he has stopped gang violence before by monitoring flare-ups of insults and taunts on Twitter and interfering before the gangs could come to real-life violence over the insults. Twitter declined to comment when approached by the Daily News.