Video of man beaten, stripped prompting anger on Internet

By Justin Fenton and Peter Hermann (The Baltimore Sun, 4/4/2012)

There can, in fact, be a corrective mechanism when it comes to the mob mentality of the Internet.

This week, a video was posted online of a seemingly lost and disoriented man being swarmed by a group of young people, then sucker punched, robbed, and stripped naked of his clothing on a downtown Baltimore street. It’s not clear where the video was first posted, but it made it to the now typical stops for such shock clips: Worldstarhiphop, LiveLeak, YouTube, Twitter.

What could have been just another tantalizing video turned into something else: outraged viewers say they have tracked down the identity of the man who threw the first punch, and police have connected a victim – who had reported an assault and theft to police but couldn’t remember where it occurred – to the incident. Police say an investigation is moving forward.

“You’d be surprised about how really stupid people are in giving out information about crimes,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakesaid earlier this month to WMAR-TV, speaking on an unrelated incident. “If they’re going to be stupid then we have to get smart and use it to our advantage.”

Continue reading “Video of man beaten, stripped prompting anger on Internet” at The Baltimore Sun.

For more about crime in Baltimore, visit baltimorecrime.blogspot.com.

Become a fan of Baltimore Or Less on Facebook.