A few weeks ago, I covered a story about how individuals in Sale, Trafford have used Facebook to help catch a rapist in the Greater Manchester Area.

Now, it’s South Yorkshire’s turn.

In the aftermath of the much-publicised recent Reece Mendez conviction for the murder of Dale Robertson, photos and video-footage of the notorious Parsons Cross Crew (PXC) have become available on the internet.

Co-defendants in the case are shown posing with a sawn-off shot-gun, batons, knives, cricket bats and off-cuts of wood fashioned into weapons. But the pictures were never seen by jurors at the trial of 18-year-old Dale’s killers Mendez and Seaon Thompson, and five others involved in the violent disorder last September.

The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to admit them as ‘evidence of bad character’, in the trial at Sheffield Crown Court which ended a few weeks ago. The photographs of the PXC have now been displayed together on a Facebook Group called ‘The Parson Cross Crew Named and Shamed’.

It has been created by an estate resident who is calling herself Morag Kendo who has clearly had enough of living in fear of local gangs:

I’m not sure what to make of this. My initial thoughts were that it is a good example of local communities attempting to right the wrongs of their neighbourhoods using social media. But upon further reflection, will this actually ever change anything?

If the Crown Prosecution refused to use the initial images and video as evidence in the original murder trial, will adding new evidence of the gang’s misdemeanours ever lead to further convictions – albeit for more minor offences?

Also, whilst members of the Facebook Group are offered the opportunity to submit information anonymously via messages (and thus avoiding being publicly named on the page itself) – Facebook by its nature is the antithesis of obscurity. If you comment on the group or just join up as a member, then you run the risk of being marked as a target by the gang.

Judging by the comments already left on the group – it is difficult for locals not to get drawn into heated debates regarding the naming of certain individuals. When families of victims get involved, it’s hard to stay focused on the task at hand and forums like these can easily snowball into nothing short of a very public war of words.

Whilst the legality of setting up such a Facebook group probably wasn’t a prominent thought at the time of creating this page, I’m curious as to how this would play out in court under a libel claim of defamation of character. If one of the people identified in uploaded images was not a member of the gang then would they have any recourse to being wrongly associated with the PXC? Quite possibly.

Finally, doesn’t such a group just create further notoriety for the gang members involved? Sadly, in an age where an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) is often paraded as a badge of honour by proud recipients – being named as a ‘public enemy’ on Facebook will just add to the individuals’ sense of self-importance.

One of the videos posted on the group is quite disturbing, particularly towards the end where the gang lists its individual targets that it plans to go after. I was planning on embedding it into this blog but decided against it as the PXC idiots have had more than enough exposure in the press of late.

Are community projects like this just an example of social vigilance or is there an undercurrent of vigilantism here which could easily take postcode gang warfare into an online arena?