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Using Crowdsourcing To Identify Vancouver Rioters
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "The Canucks' loss in the last game of the Stanley Cup Finals resulted in complete mayhem in downtown Vancouver. Everything from upturned cars set alight to looting was commonplace. Unfortunately, most of the perpetrators were able to maintain their anonymity by disappearing into the crowds. Fortunately, bystanders took several pictures and videos of the carnage. Now, websites (including both Facebook and Tumblr) have set up pages to use crowdsourcing to identify the hooligans."
This is not a case of CCTV. Rather, these images have been submitted from mobile devices and cameras.
This is not a case of privacy invasion. People have committed criminal acts out in public, fully knowing that people are filming. They're begging to be identified.
Furthermore, the police did not set up these facebook pages; these are set up by concerned citizens who are appalled by the behaviour seen last night. The police have set up a system for submitting evidence, but they have not started a "crowd-sourced" identification initiative as of yet. So maybe the police is doing crowd-sourced evidence gathering, but certainly not analysis.
I want to point out how the police behaved in this riot. They stood their ground, but did not use an unnecessary force. They rarely engaged directly with the rioters; they just held a line, and occasionally fired tear gas, flashbangs, and pepperspray into the crowd. This is one recent case of police in the news NOT confiscating/breaking everyone's recording devices.
I think the Vancouver police and the RCMP deserve some commendation for how they handled this riot. They did not prevent as much property damage as they could have, but on the otherhand, they took a far more measured approach to interaction with the rioters than has been taken in the past and they are seemingly embracing social media, rather than raging in fear of it.
Disclosure: Dad was the arson inspector for my old home town.
Not a poor arsonist, just unfamiliar.
Put just one sheet of newspaper, crumpled into a ball and ignited, under the seat.
One pound of foam rubber seat cushion is equal to one pound of gasoline. The car will burn completely down to the frame, the rims will melt, and there will be absolutely no evidence of how it was done. That's because the ashes of the paper will either be obliterated by the firefighting water, or the air turbulence of the fire itself.
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Vancouver housing prices weren't the cause of the riot. Neither were disaffected youth angry about the cost of living.
While the housing market is grossly overinflated, the rental market is sane. Young people simply rent instead of buying, and rent quite nice places too because the main driver of inflating housing costs are foreign investors buying up all the condo stock. Metro Vancouver's unemployment rate (7.6%) is lower than Canada's overall, and has been pretty constant for the last decade. There's no large, pent up reservoir of anger.
Employment rate is not always the best indicator as people are often underemployed. The common term is the "working poor" and it is well documented:
"""" Seth Klein with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says that's because a lot of British Columbians make very low wages. "They can't make ends meet. They're faced with terrible trade-offs between paying the rent, feeding the kids, or heating the house." """
- http://www.news1130.com/news/local/article/241285--bc-has-highest-child-poverty-rate-of-all-canadian-provinces
""" The poverty rate for people of all ages in BC also rose to 12 percent. It was the highest overall poverty rate of any province for the 11th consecutive year. """
- http://mostlywater.org/bcs_poverty_rate_still_highest_canada
""" Despite the manipulation of statistics by various government agencies, more people are hungry in this country and in this province than we have seen for a long time. Food banks are multiplying, each one reporting that there is not enough in contributions to meet the need. It is reported that 700,000 people in Canada rely on food banks to feed themselves and their families... The fact is that the majority of the poor in Canada and in British Columbia are working. """
- http://www2.canada.com/oceansidestar/news/story.html?id=418878d9-429c-4361-acf5-c06f05079302
Also, I'm not sure how renting from foreigners who are driving up and/or controlling condo prices contributes to peace of mind.