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Police detectives are to be trained on using social network websites like Facebook and Twitter in order to catch killers.
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) is overhauling its training to bring it up to date.

Police are reportedly examining posts on Facebook made both before and after the murder earlier last week of 17-year-old Marvin Henry in north London.

Adam Mann was jailed for life this month for killing ex-wife Lisa Beverley after she taunted him on Facebook.

And in May 2008 19-year-old Vicky Couchman went missing in East Sussex. Her Bebo page was updated after her disappearance by her father Tony Couchman, who is believed to have killed her. He was found dead in his prison cell earlier this year on the eve of his murder trial.

Deputy Chief Constable Nick Gargan, acting head of the NPIA, said: “This programme is a vital part of the career pathway for detectives and the new training covers sensitive areas of policing where limited guidance existed previously.

“These improvements are exactly what detectives need to tackle the challenges and complexities of modern policing effectively.”

Around 3,500 detectives take the crime investigator’s development programme every year.

Most of those trained by the NPIA will be from England and Wales but it works closely with Scottish forces and the PSNI and also makes courses available to the Serious and Organised Crime Agency and the UK Borders Agency.

The training course will also include sections on how to record allegations of domestic violence and rape and how to treat suspected “honour-based crimes”.

Detectives will also be taught to recognise the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress disorder in victims and witnesses to avoid adding to their trauma.

Facebook has finally announced it will allow a “panic button” application on its social networking site.
The button, aimed at children and teenagers, will report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) and Facebook.

Once installed, the application appears on their homepage to say that “they are in control online”.

The launch follows months of negotiation between CEOP and Facebook, which initially resisted the idea.

Ceop, the UK government law enforcement agency tasked with tracking down online sex offenders, called for a panic button to be installed on all leading social networking sites last November.

Bebo became the first network to add the button with MySpace following suit, but Facebook resisted the change, claiming that it’s own reporting systems were sufficient.

Pressure mounted on Facebook following the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall by a 33-year-old convicted sex offender, posing as a teenage boy, who she met on Facebook.

Forty-four police chiefs in England, Wales and Scotland, signed a letter backing Ceop’s call for a panic button on every Facebook page.

The agreement to launch a child safety application is the culmination of months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook.

Jim Gamble, Ceop’s chief executive, said in a statement: “Our dialogue with Facebook about adopting the ClickCeop button is well documented – today however is a good day for child protection.

“By adding this application, Facebook users will have direct access to all the services that sit behind our ClickCeop button which should provide reassurance to every parent with teenagers on the site.”

In addition to the online reporting application, a new Facebook/Ceop page is being set up, with a range of topics that, it is hoped, will be of interest to teenagers, such as celebrities, music and exams. It will link these subjects to questions about online safety.

Bebo the UK social networking site has been sold by AOL who bought two years ago for £417m.
Criterion Capital Partners, a small private investment firm, announced that it had bought the business, but did not disclose the amount paid.

However, analysts suspect it to be just a fraction of the price paid by AOL in 2008.

Since then, Bebo has struggled to compete effectively against social networking rivals such as Facebook.

Earlier this year, AOL announced plans to sell or shut down Bebo because it was unable to provide the “significant investment” needed to prevent its decline as a business.

The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones called AOL’s decision to buy Bebo “one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era”.

“The interesting thing is that the founder, Michael Birch, walked away with £150m – it’s the art of timing.”

Criterion Capital’s plans for Bebo are unclear, and the company was not immediately available to give further details.

But the new owners are believed to see significant potential in the business.

Bebo’s headquarters is set to remain in San Francisco, at least in the near term, but job losses have not been ruled out.

In a statement, Adam Levin, Criterion Capital’s managing partner, said there was plenty to be positive about.

“The young, highly active user base, revenue history, presence in countries throughout the world and solid technical infrastructure make it an attractive media platform,” he said.

Teenagers on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo are creating a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to, researchers say.

Teens use it to stop parents and employers seeing their actions like partying and drinking.

Instead of writing they are drunk, teens post ‘Getting MWI’ – or mad with it.  Being in a relationship is known as ‘taken’ or ‘Ownageeee’, and ‘Ridneck’, a corruption of redneck, means to feel embarassed.

Meanwhile, girls posting ‘Legal’ are indicating that they are above 16 and legally allowed to have sex.

Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.

“Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pages difficult for those unfamiliar with the distortions and colloquialisms.,” she said.

“The language used on Bebo seems to go beyond abbreviations that are commonly used in text messaging, such as removing all the vowels.

“This is not just bad spelling, which would suggest literacy issues, but a deliberate attempt to creatively misspell words.

“The creation and use of their own social language may be a deliberate attempt to keep adults from understanding what is written on the page.

“By doing this they are able to communicate with their in-group and conceal the content from the out-group. This further adds to their online identity.”

She said that one reason for encoding their messages was to keep adults in the dark about their drinking or smoking.