Vigilante Injustice

By now, the entire world has heard about the bombings in Boston. I'm not going to use the bombers' names because that kind of martyrdom via social media is not what this blog is about. Neither am I going to get into an in depth discussion of the people saying Syria, Israel etc have blasts every day. What I am going to talk about....is Batman. Stay with me.
   Everyone knows who Batman is, his tragic past and his shadowy brand of justice. Everyone loves the idea of this masked badass going out at night and wrecking evildoers. Everyone snickers when the Gotham police refer to him as a vigilante and outlaw, because hey, he's the hero! Laws don't apply to the good guy! They are for the other pitiable mortals out of the panel. So when Boston runners were caught in the blast and the FBI was hungry for clues and CNN was very clearly not a good source of accurate info , the Internet decided to turn to the one source of information it should have doubted immediately. It turned to itself. Thousands of people on social networking sites like Reddit and 4chan donned their alter egos of "justice" and started scanning photos of the race and monitoring police scanners (which, honestly, I'm kind of surprised is legal). What happened as a result? Sunil Tripathi.
 
A young Indian male, dark skinned, missing since March. One reddit user made the logic leap, and immediately the wolf pack started howling. His name was never said on the scanner, and I have looked for files of the scanner mp3 files which you can listen to for yourself. It's not there. Yet, one person said the name, and in the spirit of "social media is better than policework" this man's name was posted thousands of times in relation to this tragedy. Hours later, the true names would come out, but in the meantime, the torches were lit, and thousands looking for someone to blame had their target. He was slandered to no end, vengeance was sworn. Even after the fact, people refused to apologize. Pulled this from a reddit thread discussing the whole fiasco:

   Even here in this thread I have still seen people today claiming the missing guy is involved - and in one shocking instance, blamed for disappearing. Specifically - kposh said -

"no one owes anyone an apology to this kid he disappeared that makes him real suspicious looking"

So what is left? Where IS this man? No one knows. His family has to deal with his month long disappearance and the fact that he was the most wanted man in the country for a while because of incorrect data offered up by the Internet Justice League. In addition to this, there was a second name being floated around. Mike Mulugeta. How did our brave heroes come up with this name? On scanner at 2:14 AM an official said, "Last name Mulugeta, (spelled out), M as in Mike, Mulugeta." Clearly a small clarification in spelling is a name indication. No one knew what this name was in reference to....a suspect? A house owner in the neighborhood? Some guy with Red Sox tickets? If his name had started with D police might have been told to look for Dog Dulugeta. These are the jumps in logic made latenight online. 

   

With the situation now resolved, no one cares to look back on what the net did or didn't do to contribute to this case, but it showed a staggering lack of professionalism and proved a couple of things to me. One, the public is a bad place to source info from at night. Two, people don't care about who gets run over in the stampede to be right and get a pat on the head. Being first with information is seldom being right.

Meanwhile Sunil's family is still looking for him. Don't try to find him. Last time we didn't let the qualified people do their job, he was identified as a murderer. Just let him be.