Cops and criminals on social networking sites

Nope, not another story about cops tracking down stupid criminals by finding dumb pictures on their MySpace accounts. Yawn, right?

From Slashdot:

A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer’s Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne’s MySpace “mood” was set to “devious” on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure. From the article,’You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street,” Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. “What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room.” Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.

Original article here. Worth reading for the officer’s views on when to hit a suspect (answer: before you handcuff him) and his take on a lesson learned (answer: he now “masks” his identity on the internet).

I say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. This is just like police who set up suveillance cameras everywhere, but then say it’s “intimidation” to record them.