campus security: [april 2008]
Published: 03/12/08
- Facebook Launches Service to Help Students Recover Stolen Property
From "Facebook, Trace to Help University of North Texas Students Fight Theft" by: Dan X. McGraw, Denton Record-Chronicle - Social networking site Facebook has joined up with Trace, an online database of stolen and lost valuables, to allow University of North Texas (UNT) students to report lost and stolen items. Students can register information such as serial numbers on Facebook, enabling police to track stolen property as well as notifying friends that the property is missing. However, students will still have to file police reports. "This is the new horizon of crime prevention because it opens a new avenue for a positive and socially redeeming application of the Internet. Here is a way to catch the bad guy," says UNT Police Capt. Jim Coffee. Once an item is reported stolen, the information is pushed to a national crime database for law enforcement across the United States to access. It does have its limitations however. "If you report a TV stolen, it is not going to get recovered," says Coffee, "If you say, it was a Sony 19-inch flat-screen TV with serial number 123ABC - it is highly recoverable."
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