Mistaken identity in the Twitter age

I cannot remember the first time I was told not to take police scanner traffic as gospel, nor who told me, but in my career as a journalist that advice has served me quite well over the past 25 years.

Oh it's a great tool. The dispatchers on the other end can help you find out where the fire equipment is traveling. But that report cannot tell you if there really is a fire until there are eyes on the scene. Scanner traffic can let you know police and rescue are responding to the report of a crash. But it doesn't tell you anything about the crash. Use the scanner for tips, we were always told, but you need to confirm anything you report.

Tell that to the families of Sunil Tripathi, and if there really is such a person as Mike Mulugeta. Twitter lit up about midnight Pacific time last night with those two names, as a number of people tweeted that they had heard those names over police radios as the suspects in the shooting of an MIT police officer, and later the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. People ran with the names and they trended on Twitter. Some even said that Mulugeta had been shot dead and the police were going door-to-door in Watertown, Mass., looking for Tripathi.

When I woke up this morning, it turned out there had been a change in the story, and Tripathi and Mulugeta were no longer the suspects. Instead, two brothers of Chechnyan descent, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were connected to all the crimes, with Tamerlan (Suspect 1) dying after being taken into custody.

I'll let the current events play themselves out without any comment, but the rapid spread of the wrong names is an issue I cannot ignore. I especially feel bad for the family of Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing for about a month. They had to take down the Facebook page they were using to generate tips on his possible whereabouts when it was overrun with people thinking he had committed these crimes.

As I have stated before, both in print and on this blog, Twitter and Facebook put some powerful tools in the hands of people who might not use them for the best purposes. I am sure most of the people who used the incorrect names did not do it with malicious intent, but ultimately the shoot first and apologize later nature of social media has caused issues that will never be rectified.

Meanwhile, it is yet another example of why I was always extra-careful with scanner traffic. I know I had a few reporters who got sick of me telling them we needed more information before we could run with something, especially after a television station moved into our market and started putting scanner traffic up on its website. To make matters worse, once our digital media manager got her hands on Twitter, she started doing the same thing, and I had to explain to reporters why she could do it, but I would not allow them to take that shortcut.

I hate to say I told you so on such an important issue, but, well, you know...