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Texting: A Crime, Or A Solution?
by Paul McGoldrick
Texting has taken a long time to become fashionable in North America. (Do fashionable and long time create an oxymoron?) It has to be eight years since I saw my nephews and nieces texting in the UK, furiously clicking away at a much lower cost than using voice circuits. When their phones did run out of coverage time, they would have to run down to the corner shop to buy a time-refreshed card.
Whether the “language” of texting originated across the Atlantic – and I presume it did – it has caused considerable apprehension to the teachers of English. As long as five years ago a Scottish newspaper reported concerns by teachers about essays being submitted by pupils in the only written language that some of them understood: texting. Other teachers were just happy to get assignments back, whatever their format of submission.
That is a sad, sad compromise.
Law enforcement in North America has become very dependent on hot lines where concerned citizens – or some people just looking for rewards – can phone police to report some crime, past, present, or future. To make it a little less like you are just a plain snitch, most of the tip lines are given a CrimeStopper, or similar, title. You are guaranteed anonymity but a random alias is allocated to you so that you can later prove your identity in the event that a reward is involved.
Seeing as how you can do just about anything else on the Internet you can now offer tips to CrimeStoppers online as well as keeping up to date on the rest of your local crime happenings and informational needs.
But when the agencies involved looked, a couple of years ago, at the breakdown of the sort of person who provided tips, they found a large gap in their potential sources. The people who used the phone lines were, in large majority, over thirty years of age. So the authorities were missing out on a huge demographic spread, most particularly on those teenagers who see crime, or are actually involved with it, on a daily basis. What kind of communications do teens use? Why, texting, of course – what other way to have street cred is there?
Text tipping arrived in the US last year (2007) and has now reached the heady pastures even of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, whose claim to fame is as a gas stop on the Trans Canada Highway, about a hundred miles North of the US border.
How successful text tipping will be needs time to judge, and the news of its existence has to get out on the streets.
But if you do get into the reward raffle using text tipping for your scurrilous friends, don’t let the guys you’re snitching on find the number 274637 (CRIMES) on your phone’s contacts list…
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