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YouTube's most wanted

Could YouTube become a useful tool in the fight against crime? A police officer in Canada thinks so, and has posted a surveillance video onto the site in an appeal for information.
Written by Steve O'Hear, Contributor

Could YouTube become a useful tool in the fight against crime? A police officer in Canada thinks so, and has posted a surveillance video onto the site in an appeal for information.

The New York Times reports:

When Detective Sergeant Jorge Lasso of Hamilton, Ontario, wanted to circulate a surveillance video while investigating an apparent murder near a hip-hop club, he thought of his own children, who are in their 20s.
"They get all their news from the Internet," he said. "I realized if I was going to communicate with this demographic, we were going to have to go that way."

Has the experiment worked so far? Err, no.

After a week, YouTube had not brought the police in Hamilton any closer to finding the men.

Traditionally, such an appeal would appear on a local television station. YouTube - for all it's popularity -  isn't locally targeted. And that's the problem.

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