A combination of police intelligence, citizen support and technology led to the successful capture of a second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing on Friday.
Technology that did not exist a decade ago proved integral in the search for 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev, whose brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also a suspect, was killed during a standoff with police on Thursday evening.
The hunt for those responsible for the marathon bombings, which left three dead and more than 170 injured, started with crowdsourcing. The police called on the public to submit any images or video footage they had taken at the event in the hopes that someone may have caught the perpetrators on camera.
According to Gizmodo, it was a smartphone photograph taken by David Green in the aftermath of the explosion that provided the clearest image of Dzhokhar. Green's image proved even more valuable, as it showed the suspect walking away from the explosion without the backpack he was seen carrying in earlier surveillance footage.
Three days after the bombing, police were able to track the brothers after one of them accidentally left his cellphone in a car the duo had hijacked and later abandoned. This led to a gunfight in which Tamerlan was killed. Dzhokhar escaped and hid in a boat in the garden of a Watertown resident. Here, police utilised forward-looking infrared technology to keep an eye on the suspect's movements inside the boat. According to Mashable, the boat's tarp, under which Dzhokhar was hiding, was pulled back by a robotic arm fitted to a police vehicle; police also used a PackBot robot to search a suspicious car in the area.
Social media
The Herald Sun described the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing as "a seamless synergy" between the traditional media and social media, as journalists, citizens and even the police used social networks to communicate with the public. Minutes after the several-hour-long stand-off with Dzhokhar, Boston police tweeted: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody." Several hours earlier, police had taken to social media to spread warnings to Boston residents that a suspect was still at large.
In the wake of the bombing, various crowd-funding campaigns were set up to help the victims of the attack. An image of bomb victim Jeff Bauman being pushed in a wheelchair after his legs were blown off went viral last week. He has been lauded for helping the authorities identify the attackers. The "Bucks for Bauman!" crowd-funding page was created in support of Bauman and raised more than $200 000 to pay for his surgery and medical expenses in just a few days.
In an attempt to create some form of value from all the information that was being posted on social networks, a Syracuse University student and professor aggregated over 500 000 tweets with the phrase "Boston Marathon" into a map, with the tweets mapped out visually. According to professor Anthony Rotolo, of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, the dramatic increase in the use of social media has made it even more important to help people analyse and visualise it.
But Reuters' social media editor Anthony de Rosa warns that, in this kind of crisis situation, one should be cautious of everything on social media. According to De Rosa, the fact that a lot of the social media coverage is done by amateurs in real time increases the likelihood of untruths.
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