Brute Force, Stupid Criminals, And My Home State

In a strange and (I trust) unrelated confluence of events
today, I:

(1) Happened upon a blog
post about stupid criminals in High Point, North Carolina, that

(2) Was building off the poster's Economist
article on the “velvet glove” approach to criminals — again in High Point,
North Carolina, and

(3) Also discussed Mark Kleiman’s book, When
Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (which I have
not yet had a chance to read), just as

(4) Kleiman was
signing off his guest blogging stint at the Volokh Conspiracy (where it
sounds like he got pushback from the VC commenters).

In any event, this
is the part of the whole chain that caught my eye to begin with:

He [a member of the High Point police force] was describing a
period when the police in High Point were trying to figure out which local
youths belonged to which street gangs and which gangs were involved in which
types of crime.

It turned out that one of their most valuable sources of
information was the gangs' own Facebook pages. Some gangbangers had posted
pictures of themselves posing with guns, showing off their gang insignia and
bragging about the money they were making. They also posted messages to each
other, making it farcically simple for the police to figure out who was
associated with whom.

Criminal masterminds they were not.

Not the first time that a criminal
got caught because of Facebook, of course.