One of City Pages' top stories this week: a group of Somali teenagers posted a video on Youtube of themselves carousing around the Minneapolis/ St. Paul area, pushing over bicyclists and tormenting pedestrians. The video was discovered by people-with-power and the boys are now being prosecuted.
I might think twice about posting the video here, except that it's, well, pretty tame:
The video was posted on the City Pages Web site, covered on kare11, and showed up and various other public forums, all of which generally approach the issue of race with a respectable, journalistic sense of political correctness. But the community reaction has been, simply put, weird. The comments are moderated, and since I first read the message boards most of the blatantly racist and defamatory posts have been removed. But "Mike" here sums up the sentiments of many of the comments:
Mike says:
Normal behaving for somali f***s, only pirates and other kind
of criminals from there, nothing new.
It was bewildering to me, and considerably more disturbing than any content of that video, how quick people were to pin this incident on racial inferiority or some sort of lack of American-ness. I can hardly think of anything more American than a crowd of restless teenagers doing stupid and disruptive things for their friends' amusement. How popular was Jackass?
Rather than talking about "Somali f***s," I think we should be talking about kids these days, kids and their internets.
You know what they say: it's only a crime if you get caught. These kids were acting like jerks, no question there, and having so publicly announced their actions I see no reason why they shouldn't be prosecuted. Still, no one was seriously hurt, no property damaged--ultimately, nothing they did was serious enough that anyone would have bothered to track them down and lock them up.
Their biggest mistake was putting the whole thing on the internet. But if not for that public forum, I sincerely doubt they would have done any of this in the first place. Their actions belong to the ever-growing category of crimes that have no purpose without an audience.
Youtube and its kin, sites that allow people to upload videos for all the world to see, have played host to thousands of videos of crimes (or just unpleasant but un-litigable behavior) of more or less violent nature. Quite a few crimes have been solved with the help of video and other information sharing on the internet.
But it's a double-edged sword: there have been plenty of crimes committed with the express purpose of posting the results on the internet. Remember Victoria Lindsay, kidnapped and beaten by a group of indignant friends who wanted to humiliate her by posting the assault on MySpace? How about Bum Fights, a veritable franchise revolving around the rather savage harassment of homeless people?
The Twin Cities assault crew are responsible for their own actions, but they aren't responsible for the culture of assault-as-entertainment.
I'm just wondering when teenagers are going to start figuring out that posting videos of yourself involved in criminal activity on the Web gets you arrested.
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