The young man’s face is plastered all over my Facebook account. He’s in someone’s front yard, taking a photo. And the next minute, he’s back in a car and gone.

Now it’s his photo, courtesy of a personal CCTV camera, that beams out from the local community page on Facebook.

The judgement, as it is each day when a new photo is uploaded, is brutal. Dodgy. Scum. Dirtbag. We’ve got to get these little no-gooders. Why don’t a few of us hang out, and teach them a lesson. Put them in jail and throw away the key. Where are the bloody police?

Lock your doors, others scream. Make sure you have good CCTV cameras, some say, before the advertisements for them start to fill the feed. Even if police do get them, they just walk free anyway. Bloody courts.

And so it goes on. A different photo every couple of days, uploaded from different streets, all in the same quiet community where house prices, like those elsewhere, continue to soar.

During Covid-19 lockdowns, especially, suburban Facebook pages hosted a new brand of kindness.

Many got to know their neighbours for the first time. We dropped off fresh food to each other, looked out for those less fortunate, and took each other’s dogs for walks.

Organised locals started rosters where we took turns to call those who lived by themselves. ANZAC Day dawn services rang out from driveways. Fathers, especially, were home from work more often, chatting to their children over dinner.

It was a kindness moat, built around local communities, that warned the pandemic its impact would be limited for those inside. Kindness and connectedness would always win.

But where does that involvement in our neighbourhood begin and end? And what happens when that community kindness turns into brutal judgement?

What happens when it crosses the line into an electronic vigilantism, where people are judged wrongly. Over and over again.

Everyone, it seems, now has CCTV cameras, where homes can be checked on a smart screen anywhere in the world. But how do we police what we do with the images collected?

In the case above – of an intruder taking photos in a front yard – one local eventually took on the pack. Perhaps he was an Uber driver, he suggested. He’s carrying a brown bag in, and not out. Maybe he’s taking a photo of it at the front door, before racing off to his next job.

Possibly. Probably. But on my Facebook page, he’s been branded a low-life; a small time criminal who should be locked away.

It was the same last week, when three young teens were photographed at the front door of a pretty spectacular home not far away. Their up-close faces, caught on camera, suggested they were 14 or 15, at most, and full of life early on a Saturday night.

And then the judgment came. Trying to break in. Are they carrying weapons? It’s been reported to police! Look out. Lock up. Take care. They might come for you next!

Except in this case, as someone pointed out 24 hours later, they were looking for a party and had been dropped off by their parents at the wrong address.

And by all reports, they were lovely kids, who were also picked up by their parents a few hours later – three doors down.

So what happens to that camera footage? Who has it now? How far has it spread? And what would you do if it was your son?

It’s the judgement factor that gets me. Are we so untrusting now, that our first response is to suspect, rather than to ask? To turn the kindness that blossomed during lockdown into a brutal assessment, without knowing the facts?

In another post, neighbours have had enough of the unkept house down the street. The grass is overgrown. The house looks dirty, unkept. I know that, because the photos were all posted online.

Who lives there? Where do we complain? I bet she doesn’t look after herself either – if you let your home run down, you have no pride in your own appearance either. Pity her kids. And so the comments went. On and on and on.

Until a friend of the woman who lives in that home decided to brave the online crowd, and respond.

She was a single mother, working all hours to care for her kids and meet the rent payments on time. She’d only moved in a little while ago, and was asking for help. Would any of those judging her feel inclined to pop down with a mower? A dinner? An offer to babysit?

Silence.

So where do we draw the line? A new sense of community and looking after each other is a welcome legacy from a pandemic that has stolen so much.

But a hardworking kid, who might be earning money for university delivering Uber, should not be labelled online as a scumbag crim.

At least without evidence.