July 1, 2007 -
A virtual police academy?Perhaps.
With corporations and politicians increasingly turning to the popular MMO Second Life in order to reach their target audience, law enforcement is taking an interest as well.
The Vancouver Sun reports that the city's police department will run a recruitment center in SL, staffed by officers in custom VPD uniforms, complete with badge, belt and radio. Recruiters are looking for web and tech-savvy individuals, and reasoned that online communities were a likely place to start. Insp. Kevin McQuiggin, head of the department's tech crimes division, explains:
Any new media that comes out, any new form of communication, crime is going to migrate there... As we move into the future, we're going to need people who understand technology - that are conversant with it, that understand the impact of it and understand how to use it.
But it's not just about recruiting. The VPD is also looking into how online crime will mesh with the real world. With MMO community membership spanning the globe, jurisdiction becomes a tricky issue:
It's going to be interesting when we start to receive crime reports - you know, harassment cases or things like that - in the virtual world... How are we going to deal with them? Where does the crime occur? Where is the suspect? Where is the victim?
For now the VPD will focus on recruitment, an idea McQuiggin got from the Great Northern Way Campus, a conglomeration of universities which created a virtual campus in SL.
McQuiggin approached Great Northern Way, and program director Gerry Sinclair coordinated guidance and advice to VPD's virtual cops, from creating avatars to helping the design online uniforms and gift bags for SL visitors (which will include a t-shirt, mug, and virtual donut).
- Reporting from Canada, GP Correspondent Colin "Jabrwock" McInnes
Comments
Have to say you are wrong there. Harrasement, defamnation, libel, slander, all of these can be pure online crimes that affect real people. For example, the kids who get on myspace and harrass other kids, such as a girl in Kentucky who committed suicide from being bullied through myspace and IM.
You can also post threating messages to kill people and cause havoc. These would all fall under online crimes, and police have been having trouble figuring out who has jurisdiction where.
For example, I may live in Kentucky, but if I am harrassing somebody online that lives in California, so much that they feel their life might be lost (you know, me going crazy or something). Then who has jurisdiction? Can you charge me for anything? Its an interesting subject.
On anohter note, I wonder if the police women there really wear that type of outfit.....if so I wanna move there! :-P
I can't think of any crimes that are totally online. It doesn't make any sense. Hacking is definately not totally online, you hack a website to aquire credit card numbers or social security numbers or some other information that exists very much so in the real world. Laundering is also about real money.
But some of those issues I can truly see. These days, there is a growing number of non-retail games out there (FlyFF, Maple Story, ETC) and with that growing number of games, it seems harder to find out if they are legit or not.
Not saying it has happened yet, but you never know these days.
Have you seen the nurses on the CPR training hall in America's Army?
Who wants to bet they're actually fat guys sweating all over a terminal in the precient? Come on, I've got 3:1 odds, people!
Someone had to say it.
One wonders if there will be crimes that are totally online in nature in the future (besides hacking, of course), and how people will use things like SL to commit crimes. Thinking about this, SL's economy (Linden Dollars are a purchasable commodity) could very well be a good way to launder money. Think about it: for about 20 bucks a month, you could have one account to convert huge amounts of money into L$, give it to another account, and have that account convert the L$ back into dollars.
Someone please poke some holes into that theory, because if that really starts happening, that and the "omg virtual pedophilia!" thing from last month would kill SL, and I have good friends on there.
*nosebleeds over pic*
now if they would only do this with the army recurtment games!
1) I should move to Vancouver and apply for a job at police HQ
2) If my taxes were going to Vancouver, and I wasn't getting paid to play Second Life, I'd be pretty pissed
3) If I got mugged IRL while a cop was playing Second Life in Vancouver, I'd be even more pissed.
And, it's clearly something that a lot of readers missed on its first go-round. In fact, I think Kotaku linked in on our coverage of this one.