I wrote recently  about how law enforcement agencies around the world are using social media to crowdsource their work.

The SMILE conference  in California this week has seen law enforcers from around the world gather to discuss how social media tools can help them do their job better.

"You have to take part in it; people are talking about you, people are using social media to commit crimes, it's just, it's absolutely ignorant if you're a law enforcement agency these days to not use social media," SMILE conference founder Lauri Stevens

Services such as TipNow are emerging that monitor social networks for keywords that can help police staff to detect crimes as they happen.

"People are putting things on social media, even things like, 'I'm going to bring a gun to school tomorrow,'" Resiligence President Cyril Rayan said. "And I think these kind of technologies will be, need to be used to prevent major things from happening."

You can see one of the keynote talks from the event below, or find them all on the events YouTube channel .