Met chief says social media giants should tip off police

SOCIAL media companies should do more to remove material that incites violence and even tip off the police when they spot potential crimes, the Met Commissioner has told MPS.

Cressida Dick said, while there had been improvements in the relationship between law enforcement and technology companies, she would like to see closer working in order to tackle problems such as gang violence.

Speaking to MPS at the home affairs select committee, Ms Dick said social media sites were often useful sources of evidence when investigating crime.

But she said there ought to be a more “proactive” approach in order to prevent crime before it happened.

She suggested web giants should even tip off the police when they spotted material that suggested a serious crime might be about to take place. Ms Dick said: “We know how it proliferates and we know how much there is out there. I want to have, within my service and indeed in the companies, a much more proactive approach about what is on social media to take down the stuff that is encouraging people to do crazy things and secondly to alert us to signs that things are going wrong, for example, between two gangs.”

Ms Dick also told MPS that the Metropolitan Police was facing “unprecedented” pressure as it sought to make cuts while tackling rising crime.

She said if Scotland Yard was forced to make a further £400million of savings, they could have to lose around 3,000 front-line officers.

She said: “I do think it is unprecedented … to have crime going up as it has, violent crime going up as it has, the threat changing in terrorism as it has, calls going up, as they are, the complexity of what we are being asked to deal with, and the expectations of how we will deal with, for example, online crime or child sexual exploitation.”