It turned out that some of the people watching YouTube were other police departments. Those police departments were investigating the people in the surviellance video, too. The officer interviewed in the news piece said that using social networking sites such as YouTube seemed like a natural thing. Using YouTube this way isn't new. Canadian law enforcement used YouTube to catch a murder suspect a month or so back.
I congratulate law enforcement for using tools readily available. This is a natural progression of wanted posters from sheriffs' walls to post offices to newspapers, "America's Most Wanted" TV show, to...well, the internet, hence is nothing new under the sun.
A great deal of research has been done on how well humans can recognize same race (genetic stock) faces (caucasians can discriminate caucasian faces more easily than they can discriminate faces from other races). Any visual medium is going to be ripe for the evolution of wanted posters.
There may be some who think of this as another example of Big Brother watching. I offer a quote from Oliver's Travels in response, "Big Brother is watching us, but he's also thick as pigs??t."
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