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."

Comments

Vigilante safety patrol

[guanxi]

This sounds like a really bad idea to me. How about giving the photos to the police?

Who will verify the images are authentic, and not photoshopped to insert other people - enemies, friends (ha ha!), famous people?

Who will make the fine judgements of what the people in the images are doing? Are they committing a crime, merely in the vicinity, or passing through? Or, how close are they to the burning car behind them? -- depth in photos is hard to judge. And what constitutes a crime in Vancouver? If the mob makes the judgement, you can bet that they will leap to wild, sensational conclusions.

What will happen to the people who are 'convicted' by this court? Will they get carefully considered justice, or a senseless angry mob? Will they be endlessly vilified and hounded, people finding their personal address online, ringing their doorbell, calling their employer, their family, etc. ... and for a misdemeanor, or a misunderstanding?

Finally, it sets the precedent that all our public activity is subject to being recorded and publicized. You can argue that we don't have a right right to privacy on a public street, but if we only have privacy in lead-shielded basement, with no communication or anything else passing in or out, we really don't have privacy at all.

F the police

[HooliganIntellectual]

Props to the rioters!

How about we crowdsource information about the scumbag violent police who make the lives of people a living hell on a daily basis?

The police are the problem, not a bunch of sports fans rioting.

I was in the midst of it and

[Prune]

I have the following observations:

1. While only a couple of hundred of people were participating in physical action (fights, arson, destruction), thousands of others of us in the crowd were cheering them on. Why? Because it was fun and exciting to be caught up in the mob's energy.

2. This event has been hugely overhyped. While I feel sorry for the people who got hurt, the overall damage is not that much--a few torched cars, a couple dozen broken windows, a hot dog cart that got dragged into an alley, and looting that I am certain amounts to less than $1000 in goods (I saw all the major break-ins: The Bay, London Drugs, Sears, Chapters, and the failed Future Shop attempt, and the amount of goods flowing out was minimal--this was far more about show than theft). On the plus side, it was more excitement than this boring city has seen since the olympics, and I've lived here nearly a decade. Maybe one day Vancouver will grow up and lose the weird combination of small town mentality and unjustified snobbishness and get a decent culture and quality entertainment, but for the time being the riot is at least a blot of color on an otherwise dull and lackluster city.

3. The cops' attempts to charge their horses into the crowd as means of dispersal was laughable, since each time the crowd simply moved to a new area--with new facades to destroy. VPDs best aint the brightest, apparently. How about this proposal to truly motivate the force to actually protect other people's property: dock their salaries proportionately to the damage that they failed to prevent. I bet in the next riot there will be virtually no successful vandalism.