Who done it? Citizen investigators mine social media for crime clues

In a video posted last month on Facebook, a kitten — short-haired and gray with white feet — approaches a young African-American man dressed in red. The man coaxes the cat closer, pets it briefly and then kicks the animal into the air, to the delight of friends behind him, one of whom recorded the cruel attack on his phone. The kicker turns to the camera and laughs.

Within hours, the video had elicited dozens of outraged comments, and interspersed among them were posts dissecting the footage for clues to the kicker’s location and identity. One woman called the construction company seen on nearby scaffolding to ask if it could help pinpoint the location. Elis Pacheco, a 47-year-old marketing manager in Brooklyn, enlisted the help of his brother-in-law, a video editor, to blow it up so they could take a closer look.

Once it was magnified, a "Fulton Street" sign in the background was crystal clear, Pacheco said. Virtually cruising through the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on Google Maps, Pacheco and his brother-in-law then found the set of buildings in the background and determined the address where the attack took place. Pacheco then posted screen shots of the cat kicker’s grinning face on Facebook with the caption “Hi! My name is SCUMBAG. … My address is [redacted] but no one seems to know my name. … Can you help?”

But it is not quite so easy. There is a serious question about how well police departments can incorporate new-media evidence provided by sources outside their ranks, and how much self-regulation of do-it-yourself investigating the Internet could impose.

“Citizens can do amazing work, but pulling actual evidence is different than picking out a person and posting his or her Facebook page on the Internet and telling people, ‘Go get ’em!’” said Bill Jensen, a crime journalist and expert on amateur digital detectives who recently led a seminar on the topic at SXSW Interactive. “It's a matter of moderating whatever site the information is on and threatening to kick off people who are posting unsubstantiated claims.”

Tricia Griffith hosts two crime podcasts and co-owns Websleuths, one of the leading sites in the emerging field. Websleuths won’t allow missing persons posts unless the site can verify information with police, Griffith said. Posts in which users say they called a detective on a case and discuss what they were told are deleted immediately, as are addresses of suspects or names of people of interest in a case unless they have been reported in the mainstream media. If a poster claims to be the best friend or a family member of a person a case centers on, Websleuth moderators will contact the person for verification and delete the post if he or she isn’t able to prove it.

“If there's someone on a Web page publicly posting true inside information, they should be arrested for obstruction,” said Rich Kelly, a former deputy sheriff in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and a member of Websleuths. “It’s up to the moderators of these boards to manage the information and posts contained within, and most boards do.”

However, not all crowdsourced or Web-generated evidence will necessarily be helpful, or usable, to law enforcement.

“It’s a dilemma for police,” said former NYPD detective and private investigator William J. Majeski. “What happens when someone comes in with info is, it may be valid, but the police have to investigate from the very beginning regardless. They can’t just take someone’s word for something. Even when police seek info from the public, they have to coordinate it with other information that they have.”

Even seemingly irrefutable evidence — such as a citizen pointing out a possible suspect caught on surveillance video — might be problematic if given to police by non-law-enforcement personnel, said Majeski.

“The problem with that is the chain of evidence,” he said. “Who had access to the footage? Could it have been altered? Who is this civilian — did he have a personal grudge against the defendant? Even if a civilian found something in that footage, it’s incumbent on the detective to verify it and find different ways to corroborate it. Or a good defense lawyer is going to find a way to get [that evidence] thrown out.”

There are pockets of relentless and dedicated digital DIY detectives, however, capable of highly sophisticated sleuthing. And, like Pacheco, some of them are cat lovers.

The Animal Beta Project is a group that splintered off from a larger Facebook group dedicated to identifying the maker of a notorious series of cat snuff films, including the most well known, "1 Boy 2 Kittens," in 2010.

Members meticulously probed the footage for a year and a half and eventually uncovered the identity of the cat killer, a fame-obsessed, mentally ill escort and gay porn actor in Canada named Luka Magnotta. They worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to submit the evidence they’d gathered about Magnotta’s identity and location, so Canadian police would take them seriously.

Despite pleas from the Animal Beta Project and PETA that Magnotta was so unstable he would kill a human being, the police didn’t pursue the case. Then in 2012, the online video "1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick" allegedly showed Magnotta stabbing and dismembering a man later identified as 33-year-old student Lin Jun. Magnotta went on the run and was later arrested in Berlin and charged with murder.

“We could have prevented that murder,” said John Green. “We were on top of a mountain screaming, ‘Please, listen to us!’ but no one did.”

There are many members of law enforcement who welcome online information provided by civilians. Some are even pioneering the use of volunteer law enforcement departments. Many civilians work on unsolved cold cases across the U.S.

“The Internet age, for better or worse, has extended the ability of the public to involve themselves in investigations,” said Deborah Halber, whose book about citizen sleuths, "The Skeleton Crew," comes out in July. “Now, like any other game-changing shift, the kinks in the system will have to be worked out until, hopefully, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.”

It is now not unusual for information in the case files of missing people or unidentified remains to be completely wrong, said George W. Adams, national director of financial operations at NamUs. Making the files available to family members and interested Web detectives via the Internet has allowed people to correct obvious mistakes in the file, such as the person’s race or height entered incorrectly due to human error. “Volunteers give us new sets of eyes and different perspectives. I can’t see this as anything but a viable alternative for us,” Adams said.