MBTA Police Discover MySpace, Criminals

The Globe brings us a story of crime fighting success by the MBTA police. The T has installed a number of cameras in subway and bus stations over the last few years. The cameras have helped solve some crimes which have occurred on T property. A string of robberies on the Orange Line by a group of young people has reportedly been solved. The incidents occurred late last year and into the early part of this year. The string was thwarted when one of the suspects in a robbery was held down by a passenger and apprehended. The dominoes began to fall. The 18 year old who was caught gave some partial descriptions of his "associates" which allowed MBTA police to engage in some detective work, uncovering their identities on MySpace.

After the T police determined that they had figured out who the four perpetrators were they still were stuck because all they had were the MySpace nicknames of the offenders. As the Globe reports "Acting on a hunch that the suspects had previous brushes with the law, the detectives visited the Department of Youth Services, where officials were able to put names to the faces of two juveniles." Looking at the MySpace profile of one named in the case we found the image here (embedded at left of this post) with the caption "smoking weed everydaay until i die!!!!!" Seems like a solid hunch that these folks might have had some brush with the legal system. Without the caption we couldn't assume that those were anything other than hand rolled cigars in the picture. Or something. Charges have been brought against the four relating to the Orange Line robberies both in Boston and Malden courts and the T police are happy. Some day perpetrators of petty theft will wise up and quit posting stuff on MySpace that might incriminate them - a development that will probably coincide with the time when the police stop patting themselves on the back for actually figuring out that the internet is a powerful tool.