By Ashley Fantz
This week in Germantown, Maryland, it took less than a minute for a flash mob of teenagers to descend on a 7-Eleven, ransack shelves and make off with hundreds of dollars worth of stuff.
It's going to take much longer for police in Montgomery County to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.
"We had always thought flash mobs happen in big cities. We are unprepared. We don't have anyone who has social-media expertise," said county police spokeswoman Janelle Smith. "Even if we did, our budget looks like every other law enforcement agency in the country. It's not pretty."
Police in Maryland are not alone in their scramble to find creative, affordable and efficient ways to fight mayhem from flash mobs -- groups of people who gather in one location quickly after being summoned online.
This summer, spontaneous incidents of group violence -- dubbed "flash robs" -- have happened in Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Washington, among other cities. Most episodes involved groups of young people looting stores or assaulting pedestrians and then running off.
Read more:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/18/flashmobs.police/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1
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