The Algorithm Age

Would you play a video game with the police? In Denmark, a special team of police officers stream online gaming to connect with young people and combat crimes such as fraud and sexual harassment. “We try to be very aware of the evolution of online crimes,” Jeppe Torup, a police sergeant at the National Special Crime Unit of the Danish Police, told Euronews Next. “It becomes a lot easier to commit crimes across language barriers and across countries and we need to be very aware of what is going on in the technosphere,” he added. They also “patrol” on popular platforms such as Discord, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where they say they receive leads about suspicious behaviour from the communities. The team was set up in 2022 to tackle the rise in online crime in Denmark. “It was needed because we saw that a lot of the children are actually online most of the time – 99 per cent of the kids in Denmark are using social media or gaming platforms on a daily basis. So we...

Would you play a video game with the police? In Denmark, a special team of police officers stream online gaming to connect with young people and combat crimes such as fraud and sexual harassment. “We try to be very aware of the evolution of online crimes,” Jeppe Torup, a police sergeant at the National Special Crime Unit of the Danish Police, told Next. “It becomes a lot easier to commit crimes across language barriers and across countries and we need to be very aware of what is going on in the technosphere,” he added. They also “patrol” on popular platforms such as Discord, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where they say they receive leads about suspicious behaviour from the communities. The team was set up in 2022 to tackle the rise in online crime in Denmark. “It was needed because we saw that a lot of the children are actually online most of the time – 99 per cent of the kids in Denmark are using social media or gaming platforms on a daily basis. So we have to ...

Crime really does rise when darkness falls, reveals new research. But the risk of some types of offences – including s*x attacks – does not increase at night, according to a British study of data from more than 34,000 crimes. The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, show that the overall risk of crime rises when darkness falls – but that risk varies depending on the type of crime and geographical area. Previous research has shown that darkness reduces people’s feelings of safety, and that improved street lighting can help people feel safer being out after dark. But studies on whether the risk of crime is actually higher after dark had produced inconclusive results. To help clarify the potential influence of darkness on crime risk, University of Sheffield researchers analysed data from 34,618 crimes that occurred from 2010 through 2019 in the South Yorkshire region. Some of the crimes were committed at times of the day that, because of seasonal changes, occur...

It is 10.02am on a hazy Sunday morning in June, and a packed room of eager faces stares intently at the crime expert in front of them. ‘The number of children with murder convictions has increased 300% in eight years,’ she states. The hundreds of people – mainly women – she is speaking to, sit on neatly lined-up black chairs in a windowless presentation room within a nondescript London exhibition centre. And they barely react to the statistic; there’s every chance they were already aware . Among attendees is a teenager with a cardigan embroidered with smiley faces, an older lady with grey hair elegantly styled into a low bun, who has a notebook resting on her lap, and a middle-aged woman in a practical cream fleece. The unlikely bunch are some of the country’s most hardcore true crime enthusiasts, who have paid between £230 and £765 (the most expensive VIP ticket includes extras like bar access and time with guest speakers) to learn more about the worst parts of h...