Known as the “Politeits Online Patrulje”, Denmark pulls off an initiative to monitor social media and popular video games like CS:GO and Minecraft.
The Politeits Online Patrulje allegedly engages youth through gaming and social media channels like Twitch and TikTok in a bid to forestall antisocial behavior and criminal activity. The aforementioned initiative comes after Netherland’s Gaming with the police effort which helps the law enforcement agents around the world to monitor the up-and-coming youth through multiplayer gamer.
Dubbed as the Politiets Online Patrulje (Police Online Patrol), the former is a new specialized police unit in Denmark tasked with keeping tabs on the youth across the internet.
Alongside monitoring games like CS:GO, Fortnite, and Minecraft, the Politiets Online Patrulje are also tasked with keeping tabs on Steam, Discord, and Twitch. The entire force were revealed after several units donning their Danish Police uniform, playing and streaming video games surfaced on Reddit, revealing the group’s existence.
The Danish Police have announced that they will be conducting social media patrols so that they can “engage in dialogue with children and young people in particular, prevent inappropriate behavior and crime, and intervene in the event of offenses.”
Some reports further claimed these activities to be a part of the Danish Police online patrols in order to engage in dialogue with children and teenagers.
The online patrol team is active across multiple social media channels, including a Twitch handle where users can watch members broadcast themselves playing video games. The group also keeps a TikTok handle, where it showcases some of its activities and stream highlights to its 100,000 followers, where it has received over 750 thousand likes.
Hate speech and other forms of anti-social dialogues have flooded across the gaming community in recent years. Unity’s 2021 study found that teenagers tend to lean towards aggressive behavior patterns from online gaming and video games. According to the research, 70% of gamers have experienced toxic behaviour like sexual harassment, hate speech, threats of violence, and doxing.
The problem seems huge, but it’s unclear how much deploying a few policemen among a few servers could help. Denmark isn’t the only country trying new ways to combat internet fraud, toxicity, and other wrongdoing.
So far the above is edging towards an impending rise in numbers but with Denmark pitching to contribute towards the good cause, there is a sheer possibility that other nations do the same as well.
In 2020, Dutch community police launched “Gaming with the police” to engage youth. Online Police Patrol is gaining popularity on the internet despite a lack of data.
