By John Dempsey, WLS-AM News

(CHICAGO)  Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin is demanding that Facebook implement technology to stop people from live-streaming criminal activity.     Boykin appeared on “The Big John and Ray Show” on WLS, three days after Steve Stephens killed Robert Godwin in Cleveland and posted video of the crime on Facebook.    Stephens took his own life on Tuesday after a police chase in Pennsylvania.

Boykin told WLS he has written Facebook Chairman and Founder Mark Zuckerberg and suggested Zuckerberg implement technology to stop such crimes from being broadcast.

“Facebook has to come up with an emergency button that gets these types of videos to the front of the line so that their people, their administrators, can then stop the video live or stop it from being transferred to third parties other than law enforcement,” said Boykin.  “These companies have some of the smartest people in the world working for them and with them, and so I am confident that they can in fact come up with some sort of technology.  Look, we don’t want to glorify violence and promote it.”​

Boykin says there have been a number of crimes streamed on Facebook live in Chicago recently, including the murder of a toddler and his uncle on the West Side in February, and the gang rape of a teenage girl on the West Side in March.   Four people were charged in January in an attack on a special needs teen that was streamed on Facebook Live.

The Commissioner, who has frequently spoken out about Chicago’s crime problem, said if Facebook fails to develop the kind of technology he is suggesting, it will have to share the blame for such crimes  in the future.

“Facebook in essence if they don’t come up with something because we’ve seen this over and over again now, if they don’t come up with some sort of emergency button like we’ve suggested that they come up with, a sort of 911 situation, then they’re complicit in this kind of behavior.”

@ 2017 WLS-AM News