Gawker has a story about two gay men assaulted in Philadelphia, Penn. while walking down a street late at night on September 11th. After the police released video taken from a surveillance camera, a Twitter user recognized one of the suspects from a group photo taken at a restaurant. Another Twitter user re-tweeted the photo; immediately got deluged with the name of the restaurant where the photo was taken and went into detective mode. He was able to identify most of the people in the photo by Facebook and looking at their check-in history.
ABC affiliate WPVI-DT reports that the police department is there may be as many as 12 suspects involved in the allege crime and many of them are making arrangements to surrender to authorities this week.
While this story may be the first crime solved by social media, keep in mind the immense failure of Reddit users trying to identify – wrongly – the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.