The hunt and capture of a pair of murder suspects Thursday night in the beating death of a 51-year-old woman on the North Shore illustrates the pros and cons of social media’s role as it relates to crime.
While social media can quickly publicize the crime and provide immediate tips in helping police quickly locate suspects, the dangers and downsides to it include misidentification and a mob mentality that seeks quick punishment.
“It’s great that we can get the word out, but one thing about the internet, it’s very unforgiving,” said Chris Duque, a former Honolulu police detective, whose expertise is in cybercrimes.
“The lynch mob effect: Say they put the word out and the mob gets hold of the person before law enforcement. What if the wrong person is identified and the person is held responsible, setting off the mob?” said Duque, who now works with the Honolulu prosecutor’s office.
Police arrested Stephen Brown, 23, and Hailey Kai Dandurand, 20, near the Mililani Walmart on Thursday night on suspicion of second-degree murder involving the death of Telma Boinville, whose body was found at a Pupukea vacation rental Thursday afternoon, police and family members said. Boinville was employed as a substitute teacher at Sunset Elementary School and a part-time house cleaner there. Her 8-year-old daughter was found bound upstairs.
Shortly after Boinville’s body was found, her brother-in-law, Brian Emery, posted on Instagram a raw, angry and tearful video plea for help and offered a $100,000 reward for assistance in finding the victim’s pickup truck and her killers.
Emery said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that police asked for his family’s help in finding the truck.
Emery said he “texted three key players in my community,” among them people in the surfing industry.
The video got more than 415,000 views Thursday on Instagram alone. The news spread “like wildfire” on other social media platforms, Emery said.
Among celebrities who posted the video were surfer Kelly Slater, actor Jason Momoa and mixed martial artist Max Holloway.
Emery passed on information that the suspect had green hair.
Through “the coconut wireless” the suspects were identified by community members, Emery said.
Emery’s niece, the woman’s 8-year-old daughter, who was bound with her mouth duct-taped, was able to identify the couple from a Facebook photo, her father, Kevin Emery, told the Star-Advertiser. The photo of the suspects was circulated in response to Brian Emery’s Instagram post. Kevin Emery said he showed the photo to his daughter and asked whether these people were the ones who tied her up. She confirmed they were, then pushed the photo away, Emery said.
Within five hours of the discovery of the body, community members located the truck at the Mililani Walmart. Police rushed to the scene and made the arrests.
“It was beautiful to finally see social media used in a positive way to bring righteousness to wrong,” Brian Emery said. “God bless everybody who helped. Mahalo.”
Post with caution
Duque, the cybercrime expert, said people have to be careful when using social media to track down suspects.
People putting out information on social media should be careful the information is accurate because people will react to it, he said.
Once the suspect is apprehended, take the post down, he added. Otherwise, people will continue to comment, and it “adds fuel to the fire.”
“Name-calling, racial slurs, threats made against the person” and other negative comments don’t help the case, he said.
Some people believe that if it’s on the internet, “it must be real,” he said. But he cautions that anybody can put out wrong information, and some might deliberately provide misinformation to mislead law enforcement.
Duque knows that people can create an account and pose as someone else. He said he has worked on sex crime cases where girls are lured by men posing as boys.
“You cannot be sure of the true identity of the poster,” he said.
He said the poster might want to elicit a reaction from the viewer to hurt someone. “We see that in cyberbullying among young people as well as adults,” he said.
On the other hand, “it’s an invaluable tool for law enforcement,” Duque said, but he added that “sometimes it hurts with too much information.”
Meda Chesney-Lind, a University of Hawaii professor and the victim of a crime who co-authored a journal article on “trial by media,” said “trial by media” is a new development in criminology. “It’s crowd-sourcing. People know people, people recognize people.”
She and her husband, Ian Lind, a widely read blogger, were the victims of a 2014 burglary in which several thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and electronics were stolen from their Kaaawa house.
Lind posted surveillance video of the burglar on his blog, which went viral, and in two days the burglar was identified by his niece on the mainland, and the family returned the stolen items.
“It’s a very interesting phenomenon but it’s very effective,” Chesney-Lind said. “We got our things back.”
“Facebook is especially an incredibly powerful tool,” she noted.
She said they took down the burglar’s pictures when the crime was solved. “People got upset. We’re not interested in running a vigilante justice. We’re not interested in that. They got mad at us. We didn’t want to hang him high.”
