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Home NATIONALInternet policing helps decrease cyber crimes
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Mon, 29 Dec, 2014 01:46:05 AM
FTimes-Xinhua Report, Dec 29

People's awareness of presence of internet police alone helps decrease cyber crimes a lot, said Sergeant Marko Forss, the first internet police officer of Finland, in a recent email interview with Xinhua.

     Forss has been a police officer in the Helsinki Police Department for 16 years. He is known as "Internet Police Officer Fobba" in Finland.

     He was awarded Finland's Police Officer of the Year in 2011 for his efforts to keep order in social media by the International Helsinki Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Finnish Police Federation and the National Police Board.

     Forss began his work in Virtual Community Policing on the Finnish IRC-Galleria social networking website in September 2008. The operation soon spread to other social media like Facebook.

     "At that time I was working as an investigator and mainly deal with crimes done by under 18-year-olds. I started to look into cases where social media (IRC-Galleria) was somehow involved. There were cases related to insulting and threatening etc," said Forssa.

   

  He received over 35,000 messages in the first 15 months.

     "I noticed that I didn't have time to investigate my cases any more," he said. "After six months I got coworkers and it helped a lot."

     Presently there are three internet police officers in Helsinki Police Department.

     "We received good results with our police profiles and were able to 'calm down' situations in social media," he said.

     Because of the positive outcomes achieved by the Virtual Community Policing Group of Helsinki, more police officers have been recruited working online. There are some 40 Internet police officers across the country so far.

    

Forss and his team's daily work includes answering questions online and taking actions when needed.

     "If we receive a message that somebody is being bullied we will ask more info and usually will send a message to the bully," said Forss. In over half of the cases the involved persons are over 18-year-olds, he added.

     According to Forss, in 95 percent of the cases, one message from the police is able to stop bullying. "Because normal people want to avoid police investigation," he explained.

     In Finland, the internet police follow the same laws as other police officers do in the real world. However, "sometimes we have problems adapting them to social media," admitted Forss.

     The cyber policemen also keep blogs and post notifications regarding social media related issues, and they deem it as a preventive way to educate people how to behave online.

     In 2013, the Virtual Community Policing Group of Helsinki answered a total of 3,200 emails and 5,700 Facebook messages, of which nearly half were child-related.

     The team took actions in over 300 cases and gave 142 "virtual warnings", which asked the bullies to stop bullying.

     Forss highly valued the significance of policing in social media. He said his work in social media aspect has been more influential compared with the previous years when working as a uniformed officer.

     "I think people's awareness of the presence of police on internet helps decrease the amount of cyber crimes," claimed Forss.

     Nevertheless, Forss considered that sex crimes against children have become the most serious problem on the Internet, and effective measures are still inadequate.

     "The Virtual Community Police Team has been able to lower the reporting threshold, and young people have not been afraid of contacting us in cases of a sensitive nature. But this alone is not enough to solve the problem," explicated Forss.

     More robust measures are needed, he added. 

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