More than a year after social media was used to identify culprits in the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, a local bar manger has found the same methods work equally well to find people causing trouble in his establishment.
Last week Ryan Martin, manager of Spirit bar, posted a photo on the company’s Facebook page of a man seen on the surveillance tape, and asked for the public’s help identifying the person.
Within five minutes of the photo going online, the man Martin was interested in finding was on the phone with him.
“The response was almost immediate,” Martin said. “I’d never used social media for anything like this before, so it was really an experiment to see what would happen.”
Martin was careful not to accuse the man of anything in the Facebook post and, when talking to the Star about the case, was similarly vague about the details.
Still, the Facebook post has received more than 100 people comments.
“It sparked a whole debate around video surveillance, mostly with one person arguing against it and everyone else defending it,” Martin said. “There were a whole lot of people who posted to say, ‘thank God, that’s not me.’”
Martin explained it was a rare case that prompted him to turn to Facebook for help, and he doesn’t expect to make a regular habit of it.
“We don’t have a lot of problems in the bar,” he said. “But I think people should know that we do have security cameras in the club and they can’t get away with causing problems down there.”