Connected To The Case Company Profile

t all started with a tweet in 2008. Twitter was still an experiment of sorts when Morgan Wright - a former law enforcement officer - wrote a blog article on the dangerous MS-13 gang and tweeted out a link to it. At the same time Shawn McGuinn - a producer from the television show ‘America’s Most Wanted’ - was searching Twitter for information on gangs. That one event marked the beginning of a journey that is now called Connected To The Case. Soon after leaving the show, Shawn and John Felts started their own creative business but both still had a desire to give back. Enter Morgan Wright again. Working with the International Association of Chiefs of Police Community Policing Committee, Morgan introduced Shawn and John to them, and together they built out a terrific community policing website at www.iacpcommunitypolicing.org. Their discussion began again on how to best use the concepts of community policing and social media. The use of mass media (television, e.g.) has been an effective way of raising awareness, but has left the audience as observers. One limitation of television is time. Shows have to tell a story in 44 minutes in a one-hour show. That leaves little time to profile the multitude of cases that also need exposure. Unfortunately, only a handful of cases out of thousands make it on the air. The other limitation is reach. Mass media is a means to an end - the viewer. Watching a television show is a 1:1 experience. The only way to create a connection to the crime was to hope that one of the viewers recognized a picture, details of the event or some other element. If that viewer had no connection, the chances of solving the cases diminished quickly. It was like winning the lottery each week - the odds were pretty staggering. The rise of social media added and enhanced the experience for many television viewers, but it has never been fully integrated into the actual viewing experience. What if the viewer, through social media, could actually influence the next play that was called in a football game, or determine who the starting pitcher was in baseball, or decide which scene would be played out next in their favorite television show? What if we could crowd source the outcome? This is the genesis for Connected To The Case. It's about creating personal and relevant connections to an active case through five points: date, location, time, relation and demographics. By using targeting, the element of luck is eliminated to the greatest extent possible (not that we're against luck). Creating connections more quickly and effectively means more accurate tips. And that means cases are closed more quickly. Using Facebook as the primary login, we can extend our reach from one-to-one to a one-to-many approach. Together we are more knowledgeable than we are individually. Connected To The Case harnesses the collective intelligence of the social media universe and focuses it on every case - not just the select few that make it on television. Time is no longer an issue as social media is 24x7x365. Reach is no longer an issue as social media is global. As with Facebook, the average user has 125 friends. Globally with the user base at 1 billion people...that's 125 billion friendships working every minute of every day to help bring justice to every case in our system. We think that's a pretty powerful story.