In what must seem like old news, today's Toronto Star features a column from 'ethics' writer Ken Gallinger that questions the ethics of witnesses to the riots and friends of rioters who identified suspects using tagging features on a popular social media sites.
The author of said article does his mightiest to call into question the ethics of a person identifying a culprit without using common channels such as first notifying authorities.
The article is below in italics, used without permission from the Toronto Star.
Q: In the aftermath of the Vancouver riots, people are posting pictures on social media “tagging” supposed culprits for all the world to see? Is this right?
A: One ugly act usually begets another.
The performance of the Canucks during the latter half of the finals was, let’s face it, pretty ugly — not ethically ugly, but in Canada the boundary between hockey and ethics is soft at the best of times. The on-ice shambles predictably led to on-street shambles that the whole world now knows about. Canadians feel rightly humiliated; in most parts of the world, such scenes are motivated by human rights abuses, power hungry governments, oppression of the poor. In Canada, we riot because Luongo can’t stop frozen rubber. Good grief.
But if the riots were ugly, the spate of social media vigilantism isn’t pretty either.
People who witness a crime have an ethical obligation to report what they’ve seen to the police. Nowadays, when everyone carries a camera in their techno-umbilical cord, it’s often possible to record evidence and pass that on, too. As we learned in the case of Robert Dziekanski, Tasered to death in, yes, Vancouver’s airport, such video evidence can make the difference between bringing bad guys to justice or setting them free.
The Dziekanski case, however, also underlines that police can’t always be trusted with the evidence. There were attempts to withhold that video from the public, and it was released only when the cops were forced to do so. That, along with less savoury motives, is why it’s de rigueur to skip the cops entirely, and go straight to the public, via social media.
But that’s dangerous. Cameras generally point one direction. Riot images tell what those in front of the camera were doing — but show nothing of what the person behind the camera was up to. Clearly, these amateur photogs were in the midst of the action, and (one can surmise) enjoying what was going on. They didn’t choose to go home.
The images I’ve seen establish who was there, but there’s nothing illegal about being in the streets of Vancouver at night. Some establish that those before the lens did little to stop the looting and violence, but was the picture taker any different? And one, at least, shows a man we’ve now decided was a ‘hero’ for protecting the Bay store — but do we know what he was doing one minute before the video was recorded? Or five minutes after? After all, he chose to be at the scene of the crime, like everyone else.
A picture may be worth a thousand words. But a thousand words can tell a lie as easily as the truth. People with pictures of that terrible night are free to post them, insofar as they establish the disgusting scene that unfolded. But as far as “tagging” the culprits, that’s a task best left, in the first instance, to the cops.
When the cops fail to do their job, however, as in the Dziekanski case or the more recent assault of Dorian Barton during the G20 in Toronto, then, and only then, it’s fair and right for those with evidence to go straight to the public.
First he points out that we have an ethical obligation to report crimes to authorities, but alas, often times said authorities cannot be trusted with such evidence. Comparing it to the case of a man killed by police tazers is an absolute waste of print when he ends up theorizing that capturing a brief moment on film and casting judgement based on it might be unfair.
Jesus H Christ, get off your bloody high horse and realize that a picture of a person stuffing a sock dipped in lighter fluid in a police car's gas tank is evidence enough that the person captured on film deserves to be punished. What he did leading up to those actions are immediately there after have far less bearing on the incident than does the incident itself.
It is not only fair to resort to such means when police fail to adequately perform their duties, as the author suggests, because it is impossible for justice to be brought against an unruly crowd when the police are taking a passive wait-and-see approach.
Let's reward those that used social media as a means of bringing others to justice when the police are unable without questioning the ethics of it.
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