Samenvatting

This article draws on three years of ethnographic research into the embeddedness of crime and identity of the Rollin 200 Crips, a Dutch ‘gang’ from the city of The Hague. During the course of this fieldwork the possibilities of social media were explored. Posts and pictures on social media can be used by criminologists as a relative easy way to collect data, but social media can also be used as a platform to communicate and contact informants. The central argument in this article is that ethnographers should somehow try to incorporate these offline practices in their fieldwork to better deal with the fact that boundaries between being online and offline are becoming increasingly interwoven and blurred. But like forms of offline ethnography, there is also a need to reflect on the usage of this data, particularly in terms of selectivity and ethics.