But to stay abreast of such would-be mobs, police would need to monitor social media with a level of intelligence—attuned to popularity, cognizant of slang, filtering for location—that right now is beyond the reach of even sophisticated tech startups, let alone cash-strapped police departments. The pitfalls of this task were apparent when David Gerulski, from a firm called DigitalStakeout, took the podium to give a demo. With his service, he promised the assembled officers, they could stop tinkering with social media and “go back to kicking down doors and sticking guns in people’s faces!” On the big screen, he projected a map from his software’s filtering system showing recent and potentially dangerous tweets from Dallas. He drilled down on one tweet in particular, from a user named Evy: suck a dick and die! Jk. (:
“Who’s she talking to? What’s she talking about?” he asked in a portentous tone. “It wasn’t that long ago that Representative Giffords got shot in Arizona. So, with an angry post like this, you want to find out, is this serious?”
“It says JK,” someone called out from the audience. “As in: ‘just kidding.’ “
“Ah,” Gerulski replied. “I didn’t know the JK.”
