This article does little more than pointlessly recycle the tired old trope of the "wisdom of crowds". Yes, the Boston police tried to create some sort of ad-hoc Mechanical Turk. With what results? The relevant video came not from a cellphone camera, but from a good old-fashioned department store surveillance camera. There is no mention of who did the analysis that identified suspects on that video; I suspect it was trained professionals and not the crowds. Meanwhile, we know the Reddit threads have resulted in a few false positives that only luckily didn't create a tragedy. I see no magical improvement in police efficiency with all this.<p>Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the front page of the NYT.
The takeaway for me is if you want to murder folks, make sure you do it in a mundane way so the hive mind does not get involved and your case just shuffles off to an overworked homicide desk