Mean streets: police officers tracked their suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Watertown, Massachusetts (Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Editorial: “Citizen cops: Don’t write them off just yet“
It was an unprecedented display of vigilantism. After the bombings at the Boston marathon last week, thousands of would-be sleuths flocked to the internet. They scoured pictures and video and posted images of suspicious characters with backpacks, who seemed to fit official descriptions of the most wanted.
But they failed badly: members of the social media site Reddit falsely accused a missing college student, Sunil Tripathi, of the crimes. Law enforcement agencies got the real…
