The Los Angeles Police Department will soon release a photograph of a man who is suspected of vandalizing a car during the chaos in Downtown following the Los Angeles' Lakers championship victory on June 17. The man is lying on top of a car as someone else attempts to drive the car away.

The LAPD hopes that members of the public will let them know who the man in the photograph is.

Policing has always been a two-way interaction, with law enforcement agencies relying on the public for tips and information, and the public needing the police to investigate and arrest. This situation and a similar one from last year (when a looter stealing beverages from a gas station was captured on a photo posted to Flickr) are special because the photos are user-generated content posted to social media websites.

LAPD officers frequently flip through Facebook and Flickr in hopes of finding information that can help them apprehend suspected criminals.

While the department does not maintain an official presence on the social networking website Facebook, individual officers have created personal profiles that allow them to covertly browse the profiles of other individuals. Flickr does not require a user account to browse through photos.

A photo can often bring out a victim, leading to an identification of the suspect and finally a confession. In other cases, a photo directly brings an identification of the suspect, and the photographer can be subpoenaed to testify in court about the authenticity of a photo.

LAPD Lt. Paul Vernon, head of the Central Division, said the department's use of social media in policing efforts is “progressing and advancing.”

He said websites that allow individuals to quickly and easily post videos, photos and other information for almost everyone in the world to see has made society safer by serving both as deterrents and as tools for catching criminals.

“Life in a big city has come to the point where you can't go anywhere without a photo being taken of you, whether it's cameras at an ATM or cameras inside a store or people with their cell phones,” Vernon said.

The Los Angeles County Sheriffs' Department has successfully scavenged through websites such as Facebook and MySpace to identify graffiti vandals.

LAPD officers and sheriff's deputies don't have the time to leisurely browse around websites looking for evidence of illegal activity, but missions to find evidence of specific acts have been largely successfully, especially following large events such as the Lakers' riots the past two years.

“If there's proof out there of a crime, we go look for it,” Vernon said.

The New York Times recently wrote about a police department in India that received on its Facebook page unsolicited proof of thousands of traffic violations. Faced with a large pile of photographic evidence, the department decided to write citations based off photos.

Vernon said the LAPD likely doesn't have a Facebook page because it has focused on building its website, which he said receives tens of thousands of visits daily. But even if the department had a Facebook page, what's happening in India wouldn't be okay here.

Traffic infractions must be observed in-person by an officer to be enforceable. Not even photographic proof will cut it.

That's not to say LAPD doesn't take tips from the public. When it comes to criminal activity, the LAPD, as part of the regional Crime Stoppers program launched in December, takes anonymous tips from the public via its website, text messaging and phone calls. A photo can be attached in the online and texting systems.

Vernon said he's acted on about 10 out of the 40 to 50 tips that have been forwarded to his division. He said last week was the first time he received a tip that was “absolute gibberish.”

Vernon said that to-date no arrests have been made as a result of content found on Twitter or YouTube, but that doesn't mean officers aren't looking there too.

LAPD has chosen to focus resources on using the community content-deployment service Nixle instead of Twitter to send alerts to community members. Other police departments around the nation have used Facebook and Twitter to promote events, to help find missing and wanted persons and to dialogue with the public.

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Both the sheriff's department and LAPD have touted the ability to target messages and alerts to people based on areas of concern to them, such as where they work, where relatives live and where they live.

During the Crown Fire at the beginning of August, 5,000 people opted in to receive updates about the blaze from the sheriff's department.

“We can use the reverse 911 system to tell people to evacuate, but how do they know when it's okay to go back home? Nixle allows us to communicate with them through photos, maps, text messages and emails,” said Sheriff's Captain Mike Parker.

Overall, he said the department has a following of about 25,000 people on Nixle. The sheriff's profile on Nixle was officially launched June 30, though it had been in a testing phase since last September's Station Fire. The LAPD has attracted about 18,000 subscribers since February.

“It's becoming very, very clear that one of the big changes happening right now is that we not only have to have a physical, uniformed presence out in the community, but also we have to have a strong and dynamic presence on the Internet,” Parker said. “That's how this new online-focused community measures our success.”

The sheriff's department now regularly receives tips about compromising information that individuals see on others' Facebook profiles as well as complaints about insults and hate speech made through online forms of communication.

Nixle does yet not allow law enforcement agencies to collect feedback from individuals, but that's why the sheriff's department has joined in embracing Crime Stoppers.

Neither Nixle nor Crime Stoppers comes at any cost to taxpayers. Nixle, a venture capital company, raised $10 million in angel funding at the beginning of July and does not yet charge government agencies for its service. Crime Stoppers is fully funded through donations.

The worries about hate speech or obscenity being attached to a Twitter account have thus far deterred them from using the service. A Facebook profile remains in the works for the future, but for now the sheriff's department is also focusing on its website. The first phase of a website overhaul launched in May. The next phase will bring a separate news page for each station and jail.

“We are going about it very methodically to be part of a new age of communication without having any of the negatives,” Parker said.

To receive text alerts from your local law enforcement agencies, text your zip code to 888777.

To anonymously report a crime, call 1-800-222-TIPS (8477), text "TIPLA" followed by your tip to 274637 (CRIMES), or use the online form.

To reach staff reporter Paresh Dave, click here.

Follow him on Twitter: @peard33.