online citizen networks to monitor and influence the administration of justice william e. boyd

1Online Citizen Networks to Monitor and Influence the Administration of Justice

William E. Boyd

James E. Rogers College of Law

University of Arizona

Tucson, AZ

LEFIS Program on Digitalization and the Administration of Justice, on August 30 to September 1, Zaragoza, Spain.

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Brief Summary

Community involvement is an essential ingredient of effective law enforcement.

Efforts to tap into citizen input exhibit a traditional, top down structure that does not allow for the level of citizen participation that is both possible and desirable.

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An explosion of online grassroots political activity, facilitated by groups such as MoveOn.org, has the potential for transforming the political process in the United States and producing an emergent participatory democracy.

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The bottom up Internet-based citizen involvement that is powering positive change in the political sphere could happen in the law enforcement setting and lead to the improvement of the administration of justice.

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Existing Community Action Projects that Impact the Administration of Justice

Beginning in the 1990’s there have been a number of projects aimed at increasing the participation of citizens in all aspects of the administration of justice, have sprung up.

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Among the best known of these efforts is the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy undertaken in the mid-1990s by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

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These projects recognize that residents often have superior knowledge and different priorities, even where they and the police are equally well informed and that police/community partnerships can bring citizens closer to officers and enable them to monitor police activities and better hold police accountable.

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For much of the early history of the United States organized police forces were viewed with suspicion and widespread citizen involvement was the norm.

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Police were not exclusively concerned with detecting and punishing criminals but rather were involved in a wide variety of social services, including providing food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless.

To this extent, police were part of the communities they served.

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As law enforcement became more professional the law enforcers became more remote from their communities and an unhealthy “us versus them” mentality took hold.

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The appropriate response to these deficiencies is to reform the institutional framework to reintroduce a greater degree of citizen and community involvement.

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However, effective reform requires a level and diversity of citizen participation that makes citizens actual, if not equal, partners in the administration of justice.

The attempts at reform through community involvement to date have failed to achieve that degree of citizen participation.

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In my judgment the necessary degree of citizen involvement is possible.

The online grassroots activity that has emerged as a potential remedy to the deficiencies of the political system supports my conclusion.

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Citizen Involvement in the Political System

I have argued elsewhere that a truly participatory democracy not only is necessary but is possible in complex, large-scale systems.

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Internet-based communications permits citizen participation on a previously unimagined level.

Unique organizations that skillfully employ the technology have turned waves of grassroots online political activity into a force capable of transforming the democratic process.

MoveOn.org is the paradigm of such organizations.

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The “FCC Uprising” illustrates my point.

In June of 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed rules changes that would have dramatically increased the concentration of ownership and control of the media.

There was a huge public outcry.

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When it became clear that the FCC majority intended to make the changes despite growing public opposition to them, the MoveOn.org leadership took the matter to its membership.

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MoveOn’s electronic messages urged recipients to act immediately to challenge the FCC action by signing petitions, sending e-mail, letters and faxes, and making phone calls to the members of Congress.

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The outcome of this unprecedented online, MoveOn.org orchestrated, citizen uprising was that the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly to require the FCC to roll back the changes.

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The FCC Uprising and its outcome demonstrates that citizens do care and wish to participate provided only that they are given the means to do so.

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Internet-based communications networks and MoveOn.org gave them this ability.

MoveOn.org tapped into the desire of citizens to participate and empowered them individually and collectively to do so.

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What Is MoveOn.org?

Moveon.org began in 1998 as an effort to force a Republican-dominated Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to the more pressing business of the country.

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It grew within weeks from a group of less than 100 family members and friends to include hundreds of thousands of citizens who were enabled to electronically “sign” a petition that very simply asked Congress to censure and move on.

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What Makes MoveOn.org An Effective Facilitator or Enabling Organization?

Its membership structure is unique.

MoveOn supporters become “members” simply by subscribing to MoveOn e-mail action alerts and taking requested action as they may deem fit.

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MoveOn membership is fluid in the sense that individuals may support a MoveOn campaign or not as they so choose and a vote of the “membership” is not necessary to collective action.

Not all “members” are actively engaged in all campaigns and instead individuals will be more or less actively engaged as their schedules and the intensity of their feelings may dictate.

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In its essence, MoveOn.org is a community of “Five-Minute Activists” who share certain basic beliefs and who have come to believe their opinions matter and their actions can make a difference.

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To produce a safe and secure environment within which views – often critical of the government – can be expressed openly and without fear of recrimination, MoveOn zealously protects its supporters’ privacy.

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Preserving members’ privacy also helps protect participants from the growing scourge of unsolicited commercial and political e-mail or “spam” that can undermine the vitality of a community that depends so heavily for its existence on Internet-based communications.

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Moveon.org is largely financed by small donations from its two million plus domestic and foreign supporters and this financial structure gives MoveOn.org independence from negative forces in the political system so often powered by big money.

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MoveOn.org’s ability to finance its operations from small donations demonstrates that vast numbers of citizens will open their pocket books to support causes they care about and believe they can further.

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MoveOn.org is a virtual organization.

There is no specific physical location or headquarters for MoveOn.org.

The leaders reside in different cities across the country and work out of virtual offices while rank and file Moveon workers also are connected by the Internet.

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For most of its existence, there have been only six or seven leaders at the top level of Moveon.

Moveon leaders are listeners and servers.

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Their role is frame issues in such a way as to give members the information they need and to capture their preferences for speedy and convenient action.

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The result is that agendas are significantly member driven rather than imposed from the top down.

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How MoveOn.org Does What It Does

The bottom up, member-driven agenda setting that MoveOn aspires to tests the limits of technology.

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Moveon.org uses a bubble-up issue forum, called ActionForum, through which members identify the issues they feel are most important and urgent.

MoveOn also uses a set of comprehensive online communication tools called GetActive™.

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MoveOn’s successes have required that the community members trust the leadership and each other.

Most of those who sign on have neither the time nor the inclination to verify the claims upon which the pleas for action are based.

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Mutual trust plays an important role in MoveOn’s success.

Community members lend their names (and often give their money) to a campaign because they have confidence in the reliability of what they are told and the wisdom of the actions they are asked to take.

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It is safe to assume that if a MoveOn campaign were ever shown to be based on unreliable information or MoveOn community members were ever induced to take inappropriate action then MoveOn.org would cease to be as effective as it has been.

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Transparency also has been essential.

When important decisions are made behind closed doors and people are kept from knowing the facts and excluded from the decision-making process systems break down.

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MoveOn’s agenda, the reasons for its actions or failure to act, and many of the specifics of its day-to-day activities are open and readily accessible.

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MoveOn.org also has effectively employed numerous offline tactics, including paid political advertisements in newspapers and on television.

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It has regularly encouraged and promoted citizen gatherings at which participants can put faces to screen names and have their beliefs that they individually and collectively can make a difference reinforced.

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The offline gatherings have been orchestrated by technology-based methodology such as Meetup.com.

“Meetup” is an online service that facilitates individuals and groups getting together offline.

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The Meetup technology has been significantly augmented by a “Get Local” tool that allows people to find the most convenient meeting places simply by entering a zip code online.

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MoveOn.org As A Prototype

Its unique membership and leadership structure and its bottom up agenda formulation are what has allowed MoveOn to tap into citizens’ desires to engage.

MoveOn-like groups could spring into existence in every setting where expanded citizen participation is needed.

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These groups must emulate the MoveOn model of a flat rather than hierarchical administrative structure according to which agendas emerge more from the bottom up rather than being driven from the top down.

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Members and leaders must work together to develop strategies that exploit the power of the Internet to bring to bear the bottom up power of large numbers of citizens.

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Leaders must be listeners.

Benjamin Barber notes that  "it is far easier for representatives to speak for us than to listen for us" (or to us) and "listening is a mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality."

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If leaders lapse into traditional behaviors, stop listening, or otherwise lose touch with community members the groups will cease to get the attention and support necessary to its existence.

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Leaders must somehow filter out from what might appear to be a cacophony of suggestions and pleas by millions of speakers those messages that reflect a broad-based consensus for action.

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Exactly how this filtering can be accomplished is a process that needs careful research.

However, it has happened with MoveOn.org and it can happen with other such entities inside and outside the political arena.

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For these MoveOn-like groups to be effective there must be mutual trust and transparency.

The trust must be earned.

Decisions must be made in the open.

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Openness also implicates a need to give online members a sense that they are communicating with real people who share their real life concerns.

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Blogs, or interactive online personal or group diaries, further personal communication.

Participants are invited to read and post their thoughts and reactions to the postings of others.

Through “blogging,” people come to know each other without ever having met in real space.

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The need for a “super layer” of aggregation of groups to increase their power to impact and transform decision-making has been recognized.

This super layer could consist of ad hoc coalitions and other cooperative arrangements among MoveOn-like entities.

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The culmination of the vibrant and novel online and offline interactivity facilitated by MoveOn-like groups is the re-emergence of communities.

However, these communities will be quite different than those of the past.

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They will not be defined by geography or political boundaries.

Rather they will be composed of citizens who may or may not be neighbors in the traditional sense but who are bound together by shared concerns and have come to enjoy a sense of empowerment – a belief that their concerns matter and that their views will have an impact.

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Much attention has been given to the subject of voter apathy and its causes.

The “rational ignorance” theory as to the lack of participation posits that an individual could rationally decide that the costs of becoming an informed voter and going to the polls outweigh the likelihood that an individual vote will make a difference in the outcome of an election.

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The MoveOn experience has demonstrated that the temptation to tune out can be overcome and people induced to join in when they can trust in what they are hearing and come to believe that their actions can make a difference.

This can happen as to the administration of justice.

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Online Grassroots Activity and the Administration of Justice

It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how the online grassroots phenomenon that gives hope of a truly emergent participatory democracy could also transform the administration of justice.

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There is wide agreement that the conventional law enforcement model leaves much to be desired and citizen involvement could raise the quality of law enforcement but that efforts to date have not been successful.

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Community action efforts across the country indicate that citizens desire to participate in law enforcement decisions.

The challenge is to unleash this pent up desire.

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Structural obstacles, including legal and extra-legal limitations on the franchise, a belief that citizens cannot be trusted to govern themselves and a system increasingly controlled by special interests, have inhibited citizen involvement in the political process.

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There has been what amounts to a disenfranchisement of citizens with regard to law enforcement also.

The power to make law enforcement decisions has been placed in the hands of professionals in the belief that citizens generally are not capable of dealing with the complexities of crime in contemporary society.

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Also inhibiting wider citizen participation in political matters has been a widespread belief that the system is so corrupt as to be beyond repair and that, in any event, the voices of average citizens will not be heard and will make no difference.

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The belief that the powers that be are too well entrenched to change and that participation will make no difference is also common in the law enforcement context.

The fear of retaliation by perpetrators of crimes and even by policing agencies is quite real.

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Another problem with the political system is the secrecy that shrouds important policy decisions and the resulting distrust of the system.

The lack of transparency of operations and the distrust it generates is also present in the law enforcement setting.

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Online grassroots political action has worked to force a greater openness in the political process and a growing rejection of an institutional structure that assumes political decision making is too important to be left to the citizenry.

The same can happen in the law enforcement context.

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Widely expanded citizen involvement could work to counter the emergence of a formalized professional law enforcement model according to which the public is neither smart enough nor interested enough to involve itself in law enforcement.

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There is the mundane but real problem that community action efforts cost money and as governmental budgets get squeezed the non-traditional “experimental” activities are the first to get axed.

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But, the experience in the political domain has been that when citizens are given a voice and reason to believe their voices will be heard they open their pocketbooks.

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The point is not that citizens should somehow come to fund law enforcement independently and over and above the taxes they pay to support law enforcement.

Rather, it is that citizens may be asked to help finance particular law enforcement improvement activities aimed at bringing citizens into the law enforcement arena.

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And, of course, wider participation of citizens in decisions about law enforcement could lead to changes in the allocation of tax revenues that improve law enforcement.

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Efforts to date to induce community involvement in law enforcement have not really come to grips with the “us and them” mentality associated with the professional law enforcement model.

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The entities that have been charged with promoting citizen input are too often characterized by unnecessary formality, top down command structures and a resulting selective participation and corresponding lack of across the board involvement.

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The solution is to open up law enforcement and allow citizens generally to make their concerns and wishes known and to tap into the peculiar knowledge and needs of those at the street level.

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This widespread grassroots action in the political domain can largely be attributed to MoveOn.org and MoveOn-like groups sharing its unique leadership and organizational structure and technological skills.

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The same thing can happen as to law enforcement.

Instead of spending time and resources on organizationally heavy projects such as the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, attention should be given to encouraging MoveOn.org-type groups that can facilitate widespread citizen involvement in law enforcement.

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Some such groups are already beginning to emerge.

One of them, Berkeley Cop Watch, is a community action organization created in Berkeley, California whose efforts have been emulated across the country and many of the groups belong to a Chicago-based National Coalition on Police Accountability.

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These groups have been engaged in monitoring and reporting police misconduct, but there activities could be expanded to assist in and improve law enforcement by encouraging participants to report criminal behavior and by helping victims and witnesses to work with the police and other law enforcement agencies.

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The MoveOn example demonstrates that major reform activities can emerge from modest beginnings.

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The Internet and the communications and organizing capabilities it supports have produced previously unimaginable levels of connectedness.

But, we are only at the beginning of an era of communities and communities of communities (networks of networks) that are increasingly conscious of the empowerment that accompanies this coming together.

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The digital divide will eventually be closed. The existing paradigm that assumes a high-powered computer and a broadband connection to the Internet could change sooner rather than later.

Cell phone-based technologies, such as text messaging, already are within the reach of many of our poorest citizens, those who often are the most adversely affected by crime.

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The point is not that citizens groups should take over of law enforcement.

Law enforcement professionals and specialized agencies that are charged with preventing crime and apprehending criminals will always be needed.

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However, greatly expanded citizen engagement taking place within the existing institutional structure could enhance crime prevention through greater victim and witness participation.

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Ultimately, it could lead to a reshaping the institutions to replace the counterproductive “us and them” environment with one in which citizens and police and other law enforcement personnel are part of a community.

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As suggested earlier, grassroots online citizen involvement can transcend local boundaries.

This is important because many law enforcement problems are not unique to particular locales but rather are of concern to citizens everywhere.

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Moreover, although the primary focus here has been on criminal law enforcement, greatly expanded citizen involvement could assist efforts to fight organized crime and even terrorist activity.

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Coincidentally, increased citizen participation could help monitor and respond to ill-conceived policing methods that unduly infringe upon civil liberties and rely upon practices such as racial or ethnic profiling that discriminate against large numbers of innocent persons.

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And, of course, to the extent that the administration of justice ultimately involves politics, all that was said about the empowerment of citizens in the political sphere is applicable to the challenge of improving the administration of justice.

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In Conclusion

Not only is much greater citizen participation necessary to improve law enforcement (and the administration of justice more generally), but such expanded citizen participation is manifestly possible.

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The many tools of advanced communication supported by the Internet and skillfully employed by such facilitating entities as MoveOn.org have given citizens reason to believe that their views about political issues matter and that expressing those views can make a difference.

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The experience in the political domain evidences that the breakdown of community that puts the governed at odds with the governors is not an unavoidable outcome of a changing society.

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New communities, and communities of communities, defined in terms of shared interests rather than geographical boundaries or the ethnic, racial or religious groups to which persons belong are emerging.

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With emergence of these new communities has come an empowerment that has the potential for transforming democracy.

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There is no reason why new communities of citizens who share a desire and need to improve law enforcement could not also emerge with the result that law enforcement and the administration of justice more generally is improved to an extent not previously imagined.

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