Fighting Crime From Above?

In this entertaining but silly clip, a child was wrongly given a library card to the Tatamy public library.  When the summer reading series began, he was photographed, put in the paper, and thats when the investigation began:

Dominick led a parade of other kids around the library, a planned activity, and got his picture in the Allentown paper. The photographer included Dominick's hometown — Tatamy — in the caption; that's where the trouble started.

You see, Tatamy residents aren't part of the Nazareth library system. They're part of the Easton Area Public Library system.

A library employee checked Dominick's address after seeing his photo in the paper, then called and left a message on the family's answering machine with the news, Melissa Philip says.

I think we can all feel bad for the little boy, but this incident falls into the framework of recommendations I created for cities to adopt.  In this case, a journalist took a picture, the picture was distributed through a media channel (in this case a newspaper), and an identification was made. It was soon discovered that due to human error, this boy should not have been given a card to the Tatamy library to begin with.  Unfortunately, I'm going to have to classify this one as a public-private success story.

There is a silver lining to this story – the boy can now use his library card until the end of the year.