At Danish police headquarters, police officers are glued to their keyboards, the popular Counter-Strike game on screen. This is not the rest room but an office of the online patrol unit, which prevents and tracks crimes and offenses on the Internet.
Paid to game? Yes, but not only… Present on Twitch, Discord, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, these police officers, always in uniform and without making any mystery of their profession, have the mission of making the web safer for children and their elders.
In the viewfinder, more particularly, sexual predators and economic crime.
Last year, the creation of the unit was imposed in the face of an upsurge in online criminal activity in favor of the confinements due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“In the same way that you see a police car patrolling the street, you see a policeman, with his name, in the digital universe,” patrol manager Sisse Birkebaek told AFP.
The lawyer Miriam Michaelsen, founder of the association “Digital Responsibility”, has long campaigned for an investment of the police on the internet.
“Young people don’t see a difference between the physical and digital worlds, except that they see policemen on the streets every day,” she said.
Since its birth in April 2022, the “Politiets Online Patrulje” has opened more than 65 investigations.
“We see a lot of grooming (sexual predation) and attempts to harass younger people, extortion attempts, theft strategy within the gaming community,” says Ms. Birkebaek.
Several times a month, Jeppe Rimer Torup and his colleagues go to CS:GO, Fifa or Fortnite.
Under the pseudonyms “officer 1” to “officer 4”, they play and observe, forge links, as if they were physically in an ordinary neighborhood.
On Twitch, “we say: Hi, we are two officers playing, we need three chat volunteers, come and play with us. Slowly, our number of followers is increasing”, details the 36-year-old policeman.
Currently 23,000 people follow them on Twitch and 127,000 on TikTok, much more than on Facebook (10,000) and Instagram (6,000).
Most of the work consists of exploring the intricacies of social networks to communicate and investigate – usually in the open, more rarely under cover.
On a typical day, “we can participate in a Facebook group, say that we come from the police and tell them not to hesitate to ask us questions”, says the policeman.
And most of the time, it works, he says. In more than a year, the 10 members of the group collected some 5,200 pieces of information.
In his free time, this smiling father runs an e-sports club with teenagers, often from underprivileged backgrounds.
A hobby separate from his professional activity, but which allows him to be as close as possible to the concerns of this age group.
Of the six participants in a session on a Thursday in June, all follow the patrol’s activities but none – yet – interact with it.
“They would be way too cool to admit it,” laughs Mr. Rimer Torup.
According to him, the work of the patrol, whose funding is readjusted each year, must be long-term.
“I don’t think you can solve all the problems of digital violence with a patrol like this, but to see 10, 15, 20 people getting help when they wouldn’t have before does the difference”, abounds Miriam Michaelsen, who notes a better awareness of the public and decision-makers.
For Mikkel Olsen, another member of the patrol, the work is constantly adjusting to meet the needs and bumps of the internet in a progressive society where the police have a good reputation.
According to the latest statistics, 87% of Danes trust their police.
30/06/2023 19:40:41 – Glostrup (Denmark) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
