Crowdsourcing Law Enforcement Blog 3.28.2007

In researching this topic, I'm reminded of an event that occurred while I was in high school.

In 1997 I remember hearing that our resident Student Resource Officer (SRO), then-Fairfax County Police Officer Jeffrey R. Hand, had been a suspect in at least 2 bank robberies.

It was a shock to me at the time, because the man had spoken to us as students many times in assembly lectures. He was kind of a figurehead, and I'm sure that being an officer amongst high school students, there were many that either respected him or hated him. But no one really thought of him as a criminal.

I attended the high school at which he worked, and I shared one year with my siblings who had started there three years before me. Throughout the course of seven collective years between us, we never thought that since 1995 the man who would be come to known as the local authority--the one who we could go to in absolute dire emergencies that the school authorities could not handle--had deep down inside brewed a corrupted, shameful man, up to his jugular in credit card debt who turned to the most violent of acts to redeem his financial fortitude.

It took a collective task force of the FBI, Secret Service (who deals with conterfeiting and money identification crimes), and local police to bring down Officer Hand's crime-spree.

Thursday, June 10th, 1997 Officer Hand was arrested while coming into work.

During one robbery on Feburary 26th at a local bank on a major crossroad not too far from where I lived, an untimely J. R. Hand fired two shotgun blasts from a Mossberg 500-A shotgun into the doors of a bank that had closed at 2:03 PM when a teller refused to open the doors, breaking them and storming inside.

Ironically, even though it was quoted by one news source that he demanded money from tellers containing no dye-packs, he was caught because he spent marked-money used as bait by the FBI at a local tire shop; a fifty dollar bill.

While mostly unrelated to the concept of crowd-sourcing, it does remind us that once in a while people get corrupt. With the advent of video technology, and media-sharing sites, I'm starting to believe that it should be our public duty as citizens to do whatever we can to root out the corruption of the authority that we place so much faith in, regardless of their importance.

Dirty Politicians, Corrupt Cops, and those who believe that they are impervious from oversight should know this--one day, if not now, certainly down the road, you will be caught and exposed for who you are. The tools are in their infancy, and people are starting to speak.