The morning after the 2011 Stanley Cup riots, a host of public shaming sites exploded onto the Internet, with bloggers posting photographs of rioters and looters, and subjecting them to a virtual tar-and-feather campaign which continues today. Far from settling down, the extreme levels of emotion and mob mentality blamed for the madness of June 15 moved to the online forum, where these websites were initially flooded with support and anonymous tips from an angry public craving justice. However, as emotions have tempered, people have begun to question the validity of these sites, and concerns over process, justice, and equity have emerged.

“Indeed many of the rioters, especially the youth with no criminal history, who were caught up in the moment, didn’t think things through. I think that with the public shaming, many people are caught up in it and they’re not thinking of the consequences. There could be huge repercussions with respect to families, the future, and revenge,” explains Indira Prahst, chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Langara College.

Prahst argues the anonymity felt by the rioters is shared by the bloggers who shame them. “Irrespective of who you are at that moment in a crowd, the anonymity allows you to express certain kinds of emotion and at the same time save face,” she explains. “The fact that you have so many people engaging in this, you somehow feel safer.”

“There is cowardice in this,” she says. “There is also narcissism in this.”

The city’s public shaming movement has a leader. Known only by his Internet moniker, “Captain Vancouver” - a middle-aged father who lives outside the city of Vancouver - was nowhere near the riot, and took no photographs or video personally, but he did create the blog publicshamingeternus.wordpress.com the morning following the riots, and is credited with some high profile outings, including 17-year old water polo player Nathan Kotylak and UBC student Camille Cacnio.

“Let them suffer in the same way they have brought shame to our city. Captain Vancouver will now be your judge,” his blog declares.

After declining to appear on camera with major broadcasters including CBC and CTV, the Captain granted his first interview to The Dependent on condition of anonymity.

A proud Canucks fan, the Captain watched the game from home, and, as he watched the Stanley Cup presentation, he says he started receiving Facebook updates and messages about the violence downtown. He tells me he went to bed that night disappointed and outraged, but with no intentions of starting his blog.

“This blog may not have ever happened if I didn’t have to take my kids to school the next day,” he says. “If I hadn’t taken my kids to school I would have gone downtown to help clean up. Instead I drove my kids to school and heard all the anger and talk on the radio, and, as if it was a method to vent my own frustration, I created the blog.”

Critics of the Captain and public shaming argue that the movement circumvents our standards of justice, and they question what privilege is given to bloggers to judge the accused.

“In the end,” the Captain says, “nothing official, other than just being a citizen, frustrated, and having an avenue to voice that opinion.”

The Captain is indeed a frustrated man: frustrated with excuses, frustrated with young people he calls “morons” who lack accountability and the foresight to consider their actions, frustrated with the legal system, and the “slaps on the wrist” given to first-time offenders.

“No, I don’t buy it entirely,” he says about the theory of mob mentality. “I haven’t succumbed to that peer pressure to join a crowd on something that’s wrong. I disagree with what they [sociologists] say based on my own life experiences [...] Public shaming has the deterrent factor, has the lesson of consequences based on all your actions, especially when somebody is holding up a camera in front of your face, snapping shots and you’re looking at it and you’re saying ‘woo hoo’.”

The Captain gathers his information from reader-posted comments on his blog and on others, and follows trails of information available on the Internet, including through Facebook. Before posting Kotylak’s name on his blog, the Captain Googled the name and found shots from the teenager’s water polo team. “I looked at those photos and the riot shots and thought that ‘yes, that is him’.”

As more photos have been posted and rioters identified, the punishments have intensified, despite few formal charges being laid. Cacnio, caught on camera stealing two pairs of men’s pants, was fired from her job. Kotylak, part of an affluent Ridge Meadows family, and whose father is a respected physician, was photographed attempting to light a police car on fire, and, along with the rest of his family, has now fled his home after having received multiple threats.

Indira Prahst believes the punishments have gone too far. “The degree is such that it has deflected from the root issues, and the sensationalism downplayed the seriousness of it.”

Even the Captain shares that sentiment. “Absolutely I feel bad for them,” he says, asked how he feels about the Kotylaks abandoning their home. “That’s not what this was supposed to be about.”

He says that while he considered the effect his blog may have on the specific individuals he identified, he acknowledges he failed to consider all the outcomes of his crusade. “Not the effects it would have on their families,” he says. “What happened to Dr. Kotylak and his practice, I think that’s too much.”

He acknowledges his role in the backlash but insists the real man - the person who created the blog itself - is not as hard as the persona he’s created.

June 17: “In my pronouncement of my first judgement, I sentence you to public shaming so that whenever ‘Jonathan Mason’ is ever typed into google, your name will be forever associated with the Vancouver riots. I will leave it up to your future employer to ask you during your interview whether you were really there or not. Take your chance with that. You’ve been served by Captain Vancouver punk!”

June 19: “In contrast to quite a few of the photos I’ve posted recently, most have been University or College bound kids, or currently attending. Mathew Eakin only works, parties and is not currently attending post-secondary. What an idiot.”

“Absolutely I can see what you’re saying,” says the Captain, when asked about these posts. “They probably come across that way [inflammatory]. It’s in hindsight… Even when I look back and re-read a lot of my posts… Whether people like my style or not, a lot of it was my own emotions at the time.”

When questioned about whether he believed his readers could take his inflammatory comments as tacit encouragement from their online superhero to seek retribution, given they don’t know anything about the real man, the Captain replies, after a long pause, “I actually have never thought or looked at it that way.”

The Captain also scoffs at the idea that he could accidentally mislabel individuals involved in the riot. Calling it “extensive”, he defends his vetting process, and his integrity. “Within whatever realm I operate,” says the Captain, “I feel I do everything I can possible.”

“They [the media] have been painting this picture that these photos are being arbitrarily ID’d,” he replies, “and that somehow there’s going to be all these mistakes, because how can you trust someone online ID’ing a picture? And it’s like give your head a shake - the people outing these guys are people who know them directly.”

However, despite his protestations, the Captain has already accused someone of actions they didn’t commit. On June 17, he posted a photo of a girl identified as Sarah McCusker and a boy named Luke Basso. In the shot, it appears McCusker is helping someone steal merchandise through broken glass. In his initial posting, the Captain suggested Basso was helping her.

“Luke Basso’s father, of anyone involved with any of the photos on there, is the only one who’s emailed me.”

Basso’s father said that while he doesn’t condone his son being there that evening, the photograph itself didn’t indicate that he actually participated in the looting. Upon review, the Captain agreed, and retracted his earlier comments.

However, in an ironic twist of fate, Captain Vancouver is now experiencing a social backlash of his own; claiming to have posted photos of individuals with drug and gang ties, he and his family now have concerns for their safety. It would be “stupid”, he says, to emerge from the safety of cyberspace for fear of reprisal. During our interview the Captain’s wife called the restaurant a number of times to check in. “She’s spooked,” he explained, “and I think rightly so.”

“As much as I put forth in my writing who Captain Vancouver is, that persona is also created in the perceptions of the reader,” the Captain claims, defending his online creation. “And it’s either really exaggerated, or it’s just some guy writing a blog [...] There truly does exist people really caught up in the emotion of it. You have these people who are like ‘Ra ra ra, public shame them, stone them’… Reading those opposed to it have gone so far that they’re now viewed as feeling more sorry for the people involved in the riot itself. So you have that extreme, which I think is absolutely disgraceful, and then you have the other extreme which is taking the public shaming to that level where they want to call up Dr. Kotylak’s office and berate him. Those are the two extremes. You have one side making the rioters the victims and the other side taking it too far… Those are your mobs.”

Like the riot itself, Indira Prahst believes the public shaming campaign is emotionally based, and says the catalyst for that emotion was that you could see the riot played out on television. “The fact that you actually saw it live and you were able to see this kind of criminal behaviour, that is what I think motivated people. There was a certain degree of shame because it could have been any of us.”

“We forget that we’re human. The fact there was so much emotion invested already in the Canucks’ game, it’s absolutely expected that some people will need an outlet for this repression, this anger.”

“When things are emotion,” she says, “it can stir people to irrational behaviour.”

Editor’s Note: The original version of this story indicated ‘Captain Vancouver’ lives in Burnaby. This was in error.