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Online Citizen Networks to Monitor and Influence the
Administration of Justice
William E. Boyd
James E. Rogers College of Law
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ
A paper prepared for Conference on the Legal Framework for an Information Society (LEFIS), program on Digitalization and the Administration of Justice, on August 30 to September 1, Zaragoza, Spain.
Abstract
In an earlier effort, I and my co-author argued that the United States is experiencing an outburst of online grassroots political activity that has the potential for remedying many of the ailments of the present governmental system, transform the political process in the United States and produce an emergent participatory democracy often theorized about in the past but regularly dismissed as not being feasible in a large-scale, diverse political system. The essence of that argument is set forth below. In this paper I explore the application of our earlier argument to the administration of justice. I conclude that the bottom up citizen involvement that is powering positive change in the political sphere could improve the administration of justice not only in the United States but in Europe and elsewhere as well. In the earlier effort a particular instance of grassroots citizen involvement was employed as a vehicle for examining the phenomenon and its potential as a change agent. In similar fashion, I focus here on criminal law enforcement as it is presently engaged in to support the proposition that widespread and networked citizen involvement can do much to improve – indeed to some extent already is improving – the quality of the law enforcement aspect of the administration of justice. Community involvement has been acknowledged as an essential ingredient of effective criminal law enforcement, but to date most efforts to tap into citizen input more often than not exhibit a rather more traditional, top down structure that does not allow for the level and intensity of citizen participation that is both possible and desirable. Moreover, community involvement projects have been conducted on a local level with little attention being given to the fact that many of the obstacles to quality criminal law enforcement transcend local boundaries and can be addressed across those boundaries by networks of citizen groups. Although criminal law enforcement historically has been understood to mean street crime offenses against person and property, many of the same concerns that arise in this context also pertain to legal protection against the threats associated with terrorist activities in all of its forms. It is my contention that grassroots citizen involvement can enhance the quality and effectiveness of efforts to deal with the broader threat as much as it can local criminal law enforcement. As I readily acknowledge throughout, my argument is largely theoretical and philosophical in nature and there is much room for careful systematic empirical study.
I. Introduction
In recent years there have been a number of books and articles in the United States and elsewhere trumpeting the value of citizen input to improve the administration of justice. “Community action” groups and committees that bring together local citizenry and law enforcement officials seem to have received the most attention. Racial profiling and other discriminatory tactics that create levels of tension and mistrust that outweigh whatever value targeting persons from particular racial and ethnic groups may offer to law enforcement have been a special focus in large and small locales alike. However, community action could positively impact virtually every facet of the administration of justice from law making and enforcement to corrections. Moreover, by defining “community” broadly to transcend municipal and even state and national boundaries, citizen involvement may be seen as a way to improve the administration of justice at the national and international levels.
Contrary to common understanding, concentrating law enforcement in professionals operating in a centralized and, hence, often detached, manner is a relatively recent development. In earlier times, the administration of justice was very much a local matter in which ordinary citizens were deeply involved. For a variety of reasons, including especially population growth and the breakdown of communities caused by the increasing mobility and self-centeredness of individual citizens, over time the administration of justice became the business of official, top down law enforcement agencies. This shift was understandable given the importance of a strong sense of community to the citizen input model, something that had been lost for the reasons just tendered. But, the shift brought with it an unhealthy “us versus them” mentality that exacerbated the difficulties associated with a centralized administration of justice.
The question is whether the diminished and diminishing role of citizens in the administration of justice is an unavoidable consequence of population growth, mobility and geographical separation. My view is that the answer is no. We are in the midst of an explosion of grassroots citizen involvement in political decision-making made possible by dramatic Internet-based advances in communications capabilities. I agree with those who argue that more community action can encourage and facilitate cooperation between citizens and law enforcement officials and that such cooperation translates into a higher quality of administration of justice. Beyond this, however, I believe that greater citizen involvement in the administration of justice along the lines of the burst of online grassroots political advocacy, facilitated by groups such as MoveOn.org, is definitely possible and to some extent has already begun.
As is the case with remedying ills in our political system, improving the administration of justice requires that citizens in much greater numbers participate in a sustained fashion. The required degree of ongoing involvement, in turn, demands that citizens be empowered to act speedily and conveniently, without fear of retaliation, and that their involvement produces observable positive outcomes. Internet-based communications and the emergence of facilitator groups such as MoveOn.org have enabled citizens in vastly increased numbers to take political action and to experience a sense that they, as individuals and collectively, can make a difference, and there is no reason why the same should not be true as to citizen involvement in the administration of justice.
II. Existing Community Action Projects that Impact the Administration of Justice
Beginning especially in the 1990’s a spate of projects aimed at increasing the participation of citizens in policing judicial action and corrections, all of which impact the administration of justice, have sprung up. Most of the action has been in the area of policing – prevention, detection and response to criminal behavior. Among the best known of these efforts is the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy undertaken in the mid-1990s.
In 1995, disillusioned with the failure of classic policing strategies, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) embarked on a major reorganization designed to encourage police officers to actively identify and address sources of crime and disorder in their patrol areas. Departing from the traditional model, the CPD reforms presumed that problem-solving efforts work best with deep citizen involvement. The working assumptions were that residents often have superior knowledge or different priorities even where they and the police are equally well informed, that police/community partnerships could make use of differences and capacities and resources as between the police and citizens and that bringing citizens closer to officers would enable them to monitor police activities and better hold police accountable.
The details of the implementation of the Chicago policing strategy, and other such community action efforts, are less important here than identifying the common impetus for them, namely, that the quality of the administration of justice has suffered from the centralization and detachment of policing, judicial and corrections agencies operating without sufficient input from the citizens of the communities that these agencies are charged with protecting. Interestingly, the present model of formal and professional law enforcement agencies is a relatively recent phenomenon and that for much of the early history of the United States organized police forces were viewed with suspicion. Widespread citizen involvement was the norm. Moreover, even as the growth and complexity of communities increased, 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. As law enforcement became more professional the law enforcers became more remote from their communities and an unhealthy “us versus them” mentality took hold.
Stated differently, deficiencies in the quality of the administration of justice, certainly at the policing level, may be attributed to the institutional framework that has emerged. The appropriate response to these deficiencies is to reform the institutional framework to reintroduce a greater degree of citizen and community involvement. Current efforts to do so, such as the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, represent a positive step in the right direction. However, these efforts are not without their own problems. 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. In the Chicago policing case, some police beats have drawn substantial citizen engagement while others have elicited little. Moreover, while some of the citizen groups have coalesced with the policing agencies into deliberative and innovative partnerships others have degenerated into conflict and inactivity. The question then becomes whether citizen participation sufficient to produce true reform is possible. In my judgment the answer to this question is that it is possible and evidence to support my conclusion may be found in the online grassroots activity that has emerged as a potential remedy to the deficiencies of the political system.
III. Citizen Involvement in the Political System
Over the years, many learned scholars have urged that the solution to our ailing democracy is more democracy. However, these same scholars generally concluded that a participatory democracy was not feasible in complex, large-scale systems. In an essay entitled “Facilitator Networks and Transforming the Democratic Process – Some Preliminary Thoughts,” I and my co-author argued that a participatory democracy is indeed necessary because the people are the only independent check on abuses of power by representatives who respond to the demands of special interests at the expense of the common good but, contrary to the lament of democracy theorists, participatory democracy is not only feasible but is actually emerging around us. We further asserted that what has made widespread citizen participation possible is the Internet and the emergence of unique organizations, epitomized by MoveOn.org, that have facilitated waves of grassroots online political activity capable of transforming the democratic process.
In making our case, we focused on what has come to be known as the “FCC Uprising.” In June of 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), operating largely outside of public view and without citizen input, proposed changes to the rules limiting ownership of media outlets so as to increase the already unhealthy degree of concentration of ownership and control of the media. When word of the proposed changes eventually leaked out, there was a huge public outcry opposing the rules changes on the ground that they would further undermine the already narrowed opportunities for the free exchange of diverse points of view critical to a healthy democracy.
Initially, the opposition was in the form of conventional protests, including the filing of a lawsuit, by a range of public interest groups. But, before long MoveOn.org entered the fray and the dynamics of the protest changed dramatically. As it became clear that the FCC majority was determined to make the rules changes despite an increasing stream of public commentary opposing the changes, the MoveOn.org staff took the matter to its membership. Over several weeks, a series of characteristically concise and to the point messages were communicated to the MoveOn.org members (who sent them on to their associates and friends). These messages laid out the salient facts – the FCC was about to significantly increase the percentage of media outlets that could be owned by a single corporate conglomerate and the resulting concentration of control threatened the open exchange of diverse points of view that is central to a healthy democracy – and 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 FCC, all using contact information provided by MoveOn.org. When the FCC pushed ahead, the campaign shifted and opposition was directed at Congress. One of the many communications sent by the MoveOn.org staff to supporters (and by them to others as well) is set out in Appendix A. The result was hundreds of thousand of e-mail messages, faxes, letters, phone calls and ultimately stacks of petitions expressing collective outrage at the FCC action. The net result 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.
In our minds, the FCC Uprising exemplified the kind of emergent participatory democracy that is possible because of the Internet and organizations such as MoveOn.org. The power of the Internet stemming from its speed and ease of widespread advanced communications is well known. We argued, however, that it has only begun to be appreciated that the vastly improved communications capability, skillfully employed by groups such as MoveOn.org, can empower citizens to the extent necessary to force unresponsive governors to yield to the public interest. We then sought to infer from the FCC Uprising the essential features of a viable online citizen-based independent force that could lead to, was already leading to, an emergent participatory democracy.
The Internet, of course, is a key element. Without the communication-based organizing power of the Internet, citizen involvement in governance on the scale necessary to make its influence felt would not be possible. But, the advent of the Internet alone does not explain the FCC Uprising and the emergent participatory democracy it portends. There have been other changes that contribute to the phenomenon.
To begin with, the character of the citizenry has changed. A high degree of suspicion of the “masses” and a fear of the “tyranny of the majority” lead the framers of the United States Constitution to devise a system of government that deliberately kept citizens generally at a distance and reposed the power of governance in an elite group that could be trusted to act appropriately. This distrust of citizens generally was understandable given the historical circumstances of a largely under-educated and uninformed populace that could not reasonably be expected to govern wisely. However, circumstances have changed. Citizens generally are much better educated and informed than their historical peers. Many citizens are more educated, better informed and, at least collectively, have greater expertise on matters pertinent to governance than many of those who hold elected office at the local, state and national levels. Moreover, and of critical importance, and as the FCC Uprising evidences that large numbers of citizens care about and are ready and willing to participate in matters of state, provided only that they are given the opportunity and the ability to do so.
We further concluded, however, that the existence of a citizenry that is eager to engage in and is capable of governance, together with the Internet-based communications network that allows them to join together to make their views known, is not enough. Some entity that acts as a catalyst to unleash the power also is required. In our judgment, the entities that are essential to the realization of participatory democracy are facilitating groups, such as MoveOn.org. We refer to these unique organizations as “facilitator nets” or simply “f-nets.” In ways not yet fully understood, these f-nets “move” citizens by tapping into their desire to participate and empowering them individually and collectively to do so. In our essay we identified a number of attributes of MoveOn.org (and, hence, of f-nets more generally) that we believe enable it to perform the facilitating function necessary to translating citizen capability and latent desire into effective action.
Moveon.org, which is headed up by the husband and wife team, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, of Berkeley, California, 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. The genesis of the campaign was a shared belief that Congress was mired in a tawdry effort to smear President Clinton and remove him from office for personal indiscretions that had little to do with his ability to govern. At its inception the group consisted of less than 100 family and friends. Within weeks it grew to include hundreds of thousands of citizens who signed a petition that very simply asked Congress to censure and move on. Remarkably, the list of contacts and participants expanded largely by “word of mouth” and without the use of unsolicited electronic mail messages.
Much of the reporting on MoveOn.org refers to its supporters as “members.” Membership in an organization traditionally conceives of members as persons who formally join an organization and commit to the organization in more conventional ways, such as paying annual dues and attending meetings. “Membership” in MoveOn departs from this model in important ways, including the fact that MoveOn supporters become “members” simply by subscribing to MoveOn e-mail action alerts and taking requested action as they may deem fit. They may cease to be “members” by “unsubscribing,” something they may do with great ease. MoveOn “membership,” additionally, does not fit the traditional mold of membership because it is more 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 for the “members” to take collective action. Indeed, it is well understood that not all “members” will be 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. For these reasons, it may be more accurate to refer to the “MoveOn community” and to MoveOn supporters as “members of the MoveOn community.”
The concept of a community is important beyond any discussion of MoveOn.org and may well be central to a functioning participatory democracy and to effective grassroots action more generally. We agree with Robert Putnam and others who insist that a large organization whose “members” support actions taken by a centralized and select group of leaders only by paying some modest annual dues and do not otherwise participate in decisions as to what actions to take with respect to which issues is not really a “community.” However, for the reasons set forth below, we believe that “MoveOn (and organizations that operate the way it does) has those ingredients of community that are necessary to participatory governance.
MoveOn.org has been vigilant in protecting the privacy of the members of the MoveOn community
and even now, when its contact list numbers more than two million it has refused to release that list to groups that share many of its goals, including the Democratic Party. This zealous protection of its supporters’ privacy is viewed as being critical to producing a safe and secure environment within which views – often critical of the government – can be expressed openly and without fear of recrimination. It also reflects the essential need to protect participants from the growing scourge of unsolicited commercial and political e-mail or “spam.”
Another unique feature of MoveOn.org is its financial support system. Initially MoveOn.org was financed from the founders’ own pockets. Currently, with some recent exceptions for large media campaigns, Moveon.org is financed by small donations from its two million plus domestic and foreign supporters. The ability of MoveOn.org to finance its operations from small donations from many, many people contrasts sharply with a system of governance that is heavily dependent upon large donations from the wealthy few who in return are given undue influence to promote their special interests at the expense of the public good and allows MoveOn.org to preserve an independence from often negative forces in the political system. The MoveOn.org financing system served as a model for the spectacularly successful fundraising efforts of Howard Dean and, more recently, John Kerry. More basically, and of greater general importance, the MoveOn.org experience demonstrates that vast numbers of citizens will open their pocket books to support causes they care about and believe they can further.
Among the most intriguing attributes of MoveOn.org is its leadership structure. For most of its existence, there were only six or seven leaders at the top level of Moveon and facilitator personnel are distributed throughout the organization. Thus, as explained by co-founder Wes Boyd, the role of leaders is to frame the issues in such a way as to give people the information they need and to capture their preferences for speedy and convenient action. Leaders and participants are thought of more as colleagues and peers than leaders and followers. Moveon leaders see their role as facilitators. They are listeners and servers. Determining which matters deserve attention is very much accomplished by asking the MoveOn community of supporters what is on their minds.
There is no specific physical location or headquarters for MoveOn.org. Co-founders Wes Boyd and Joan Blades work out of an office in their home in Berkeley. Other leaders reside across the country and work out of virtual offices. Rank and file Moveon workers are volunteers who also are connected by the Internet. Administrative and operations costs are comparatively very low. As noted above, the costs of MoveOn’s many political campaigns generally are absorbed by the Moveon supporters making online contributions. The “virtuality” is a defining feature of the MoveOn.org organization and the phenomenon it has facilitated.
Wes Boyd describes the structure of Moveon as being more organic than mechanistic and flat rather than hierarchical. Moveon leaders are profoundly sensitive to the potential costs of bureaucratization and they have repeatedly resisted the inevitable pressures to become a more command control structure that values efficiency at the expense of diversity and member input and agenda setting. Likewise, the leadership has constantly balanced the desire to expand the scope of its activities against the tendency toward a more top down organizational structure that such expansion could require.
Undeniably, the bottom up, member-driven action agenda that MoveOn aspires to facilitate, and which requires an ability to invite supporters to make their views known and to evaluate and aggregate the many voices into a course of collective action, tests the limits of technology. Moveon.org basically invented and implemented and continues to seek to refine a bubble-up issue forum, called ActionForum, through which members identify the issues they feel are most important and urgent and the issues are ranked in terms of importance. The Forums technology periodically randomly “polls” the MoveOn community members and generates reports that are then distributed to the leadership. According to Wes Boyd the Moveon leadership depends on the reports to get a continuous reading of MoveOn community concerns.
Another technology that MoveOn (and a number of other online grassroots organizations) has successfully employed is GetActive™. As stated in its website, “the GetActive Suite is a set of comprehensive online communication tools that includes a powerful relational database, along with modules for email messaging, fundraising, advocacy, community building, event management and Website management. Each of our modules also includes extensive reporting capabilities that allow summary analysis of results as well as details on individual member interactions. To account for the range of technological expertise of the many groups seeking to exploit the Internet, GetActive includes hands-on support and training. Every GetActive client receives a dedicated account manager, as well as access to its Professional Services team and extensive partner network of industry experts, to help their clients make the most of their technology investment.”
On several occasions the MoveOn leadership has simply asked members to tell them what they consider to be the most pressing issues facing our country as a way to test for changes in general temperament over time. Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that MoveOn.org is completely bottom up, its organizational and leadership structure and the use of technology such as ActionForum and GetActive demonstrate it is very different from traditional top down public interest groups.
To summarize to this point, observations of MoveOn.org’s organizational and leadership structure and its activities to date indicate that the truly distinguishing features of the facilitator net entities (f-nets) needed to tap into citizens’ desire to engage pertain to their structure, leadership and agenda formulation. Structurally, f-nets are more organic than mechanistic and their administrative structure is flat rather than hierarchical. Likewise, their agendas emerge more from the bottom up rather than from the top down. In ways that are not yet fully understood, and that will be the subject of future research, f-net decisions are made through a complex exchange of preferences, options and choices between primary leadership figures and community members and secondary leaders dispersed throughout the organization. Political events, such as the actions of the FCC and its chair, Michael Powell, may fuel f-net activity, but supporters, with or without input from traditional public interests groups, and their leaders, play a central role in identifying governmental activity that demands a response. The community members pass the information along to others, including f-net leaders, who 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.
The importance of listening, so highly valued by MoveOn.org. cannot be overstated. From listening comes empathy and understanding. Benjamin Barber notes that, "it is far easier for representatives to speak for us than to listen for us" (or to us). Regarding its relationship to equality, he says, "listening is a mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality." Listening, therefore, is the acid test of leadership in f-nets. If leaders lapse into traditional roles, stop listening, or otherwise get out of tune with community members, an f-net will cease to get the attention and support necessary to its existence. Clearly, an effective listening process is complex and not well understood. Leaders cannot listen indiscriminately to what would be a cacophony of suggestions and pleas by millions of speakers. They must somehow filter out those messages that reflect a broad-based consensus for action. Exactly how this happens (or does not happen) so as to produce actions that have wide grassroots’ support (or not) is a process that needs careful research. However, it is happening with MoveOn.org and can happen with other such entities inside and outside the political arena.
Another essential ingredient of MoveOn’s success and, hence, the success of f-net entities more generally, is that the community members must 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. MoveOn community members early on were labeled “five minute activists.” They generally have drawn little support from the mainstream media. 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. Why the community members have such trust is a nice question also demanding of further research. It may be that they trust in the process rather than the leaders and facilitators personally. Or, the trust may be attributable to experience. 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. The same may be said for any other f-net. It will not be effective without the trust of its supporters.
Related to the matter of trust is the quality of transparency. Transparency is understood to be essential to a healthy democratic process. Our political system has broken down because of an increasing degree of secrecy characterized by behind closed doors decisions by unknown decision makers all done in the name of national security or other such pretext for keeping people from knowing the facts and excluding them from the decision-making process. The controversy with regard to Vice President Cheney’s energy advisory committee is a telling example. Although much of MoveOn’s internal workings are concealed and, as noted, MoveOn zealously guards the privacy of its community members, including especially its subscriber list and demographic information, 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. Other f-nets must be similarly open.
Openness also implicates a need to give online members a sense that they are communicating with real people who share their real life concerns and not with some representative of a person or group whose hidden agenda is to preserve and promote self interest and who responds with an automated form rather than in person. One tool that supports such personal communication is a blog. A blog is an interactive online personal or group diary. People 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. The best blogs turns their audiences into speakers and inspire both reading and writing. Those who create and manage a blog site are able to tune into this ongoing dialogue and discern from it the direction and tone of the desires of participants generally. MoveOn.org does not have a members’ blog, but it certainly could.
Many groups have employed blogs to create communities, sometimes referred to by observers and participants alike as “blogospheres,” built around a range of shared interests. Political parties and candidates use blogs extensively. Much of the ability of the Howard Dean campaign to reach and motivate huge numbers of persons, many of whom had not previously been political active, has been attributed by campaign insiders to the Dean for America blog. Blogs inspired by political concerns tend to reflect a distrust of the mainstream media. And, blogging has been viewed as an alternative to an increasingly commercialized mainstream media and as constituting a “new journalism.”
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. The MoveOn experience indicates that the theory has been turned upside down and people have rationally chosen to join in because they can trust in what they are hearing and because they believe that their actions can make a difference. Poignant evidence of the truth of this assertion can be found in a best selling book published by MoveOn.org in 2004. A good summary of the successes of the online grassroots political efforts was recently summarized in an e-mail message from the MoveOn leadership to its members.
In the earlier essay, we were at pains to make clear that our objective was not to tout MoveOn.org as such, but rather to offer it as the best current example of an f-net. We pointed out that there are other entities that exhibit at least some of MoveOn.org’s f-net characteristics. Among them are Steven Clift’s Minnesota E-Democracy, with its focus on “public commons” and cyberspace-facilitating role, Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons project, with its focus on linking creative people and ideas, and the previously mentioned Howard Dean’s on-line presidential campaign, an obvious groundbreaker in electronic grass roots fund raising. To this list could be added the True Majority, Win Without War, and the Peace Action Coalition, all of which are Internet-based but are somewhat more issue selective. Moreover, many traditional public interests group, among them Common Cause,People for the American Way (PFAW), NARAL and a range of environmental groups all are developing a strong online presence and are looking more like Moveon.org (except that for the most part their top-down structure remains largely intact).
We also acknowledged that exerting sufficient influence on the political decision-making process cannot be achieved exclusively online. MoveOn.org has effectively employed numerous offline tactics, including paid political advertisements in newspapers and on television. Moreover, MoveOn.org has regularly encouraged and promoted citizen gatherings at which participants can put faces to screen names, become more intimately acquainted and learn that their concerns are shared and have their beliefs that they individually and collectively can make a difference reinforced. The offline dimension of political action is particularly important with regard to those who are unable to use the Internet or are disinclined to engage online. The “digital divide” is closing, but large numbers of citizens still do not have access to the Internet and many persons, especially the elderly and physically disabled, are not able to make use of a computer or are leery of doing so.
One technology-based methodology that MoveOn.org, and perhaps even more so the Howard Dean campaign, used effectively to promote offline activity is Meetup.com. “Meetup” is an online service that facilitates individuals and groups getting together offline. The scope of Meetup is greater than politics, but it is a very effective tool for connecting people to each other. The Meetup technology has been significantly augmented by software that allows people to find the most convenient meeting places simply by entering a zip code online. This “Get Local” tool, as it was referred to by the Howard Dean campaign staff, is itself an interesting example of expanded participation in that users were invited to submit suggestions for improvement and many of the suggestions were incorporated into the software.
We envisioned in our essay the need for a “super layer” of aggregation as an important part of the interface between the emergence process and the political system. This super layer would consist of ad hoc coalitions and other cooperative arrangements among MoveOn-like entities (f-nets). Our continuing study of Moveon.org has revealed that there already is a substantial amount of collaboration and cooperation going on among different networks and groups. The most common situation appears to involve cooperation among two or three groups on a campaign initiated by one of them. Much of the collaboration to date has been more spontaneous and ad hoc than systematic and planned. But, invariably there is an entity, such as MoveOn.org, an f-net, that facilitates participation by expanded numbers of concerned citizens.
The culmination of the vibrant and novel online and offline interactivity is the re-emergence of communities. These communities are quite different than those of the past. They are not defined by geography or political boundaries. Rather they are composed of citizens who may or may not be neighbors in the traditional sense but who are bound together by shared concerns and who, with the essential help of f-nets, such as MoveOn.org, have come to enjoy a sense of empowerment – a belief that their concerns matter and that their views will have an impact.
IV. Online Grassroots Activity and the Administration of Justice
It does not take a great deal of imagination to appreciate the relevance of the emergent participatory democracy phenomenon described above to the administration of justice. The need for community involvement in law enforcement has been acknowledged. But, as was noted, efforts to date to expand citizen input have been less successful than hoped and the potential for improvement in the quality of law enforcement has yet to be realized. In this part I offer some preliminary thoughts as to how online grassroots action is pertinent to and could lead to an improvement in law enforcement and the administration of justice more generally.
I begin by disclaiming any assertion that what produces MoveOn.org facilitated grassroots political activity can somehow be picked up and plopped down on the administration of justice. In actuality, there is no specific thing to pick up and plop down. Online grassroots political activity is more of a happening – a phenomenon – than a thing or even a specific plan of action. What I envision is that what happened, and continues to happen, in the political arena could happen in the administration of justice setting.
I start with the assumptions made by efforts to date to improve law enforcement, namely, that the conventional law enforcement model leaves much to be desired and citizen involvement could do much to raise the quality of law enforcement. In an important sense, these community action projects echo the basic theme explored earlier, namely, that the cure for an ailing democracy is more democracy. However, there are other basic similarities. In the political arena the necessary level of citizen involvement has been absent because citizens have been denied access by structural obstacles, including legal and extra-legal limitations on the franchise. Citizen participation in law enforcement, likewise, diminished over time as the result of the movement to a professional law enforcement model that took the power to make decisions about law enforcement from citizens and placed it in the hands of professionals in the belief that citizens generally were not capable of dealing with the complexities of crime in contemporary society and only trained experts can do so. There has been, in short, what amounts to a disenfranchisement of citizens when it comes to law enforcement.
Less obviously, 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 average citizens’ voices will not be heard and will make no difference. For those stalwarts who persist in their activism there active involvement may even have negative repercussions in the form of governmental invasions of privacy, intimidation and blacklists such as characterized the McCarthy Era and later the Anti-Viet Nam War Movement. Such obstacles to citizen involvement also may be found in the law enforcement setting. The belief that the powers that be are too well entrenched to change and that participation will make no difference is common. At the specific level of law enforcement the fear of retaliation by perpetrators of crimes and even by policing agencies is quite real.
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. Much of the difficulty is attributable to 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. As has been explained, 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.
Then 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. Here again, 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. 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. And, of course, wider participation of citizens in decisions about law enforcement should lead to changes in the allocation of tax revenues that improve law enforcement.
As noted earlier, the outburst of citizen participation reflects a repressed desire of citizens to engage coupled with the skillful employment by MoveOn.org of the Internet as an organizing and communication tool to instill in citizens a sense of empowerment and a belief that their involvement can make a difference. This came about very much because of the uniqueness of the MoveOn.org leadership and bottom-up organizational structure. The same could happen in the law enforcement setting. Efforts to date have sought to induce community involvement without really coming to grips with the “us and them” mentality associated with the professional law enforcement model. The entities 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.
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. The desire for improvement and to participate undoubtedly is there. The problem is unleashing that desire. The FCC Uprising demonstrated that there is a broad-based interest in media ownership regulation and citizens wished to make their voices heard. It remained only for MoveOn.org, with its unique leadership and organizational structure and technological skills to move these large numbers of citizens to act. I believe the same thing can happen as to law enforcement. Instead of spending time and resources on organizationally heavy projects such as the Chicago Alternative Police Model, attention should be given to the possibility of encouraging MoveOn.org-type groups who can facilitate citizen involvement in law enforcement. As a matter of fact, such groups are already beginning to emerge. One of them, Berkeley Cop Watch, is a community action organization created in Berkeley, California. The Berkeley group’s efforts have been emulated across the country and many of the groups belong to a Chicago-based National Coalition on Police Accountability. Although the primary focus of these efforts is to monitor and report police misconduct, 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.
The MoveOn example demonstrates that major reform activities can emerge from modest beginnings. Although the Internet and the communications and organizing capabilities it supports have produced previously unimaginable levels of connectedness we surely 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. 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. For example, cell phone-based technologies such as text messaging are already within the reach of many of our poorest citizens, those who often are the most adversely affected by crime. But, the point remains that expanding communities of concerned citizens to include all socio-economic groups cannot help but enhance the prospects for improved law enforcement and the administration of justice more generally.
There is no scarcity of potential forms of participation that f-nets can promote. The literature contains many interesting ideas, such as deliberative polling, exploring incentives for increasing deliberative participation, and jury-like task forces. However, until recently such proposals sat on the shelf because they required top-down sanctions, direction, and implementation. Technological advances have begun to remove this obstacle. It is necessary only that these technologies be pulled off the shelf and given a whirl. To these technologies should be added a mechanism being developed by the authors of the essay upon which much of this paper is based, and which has been labeled “Citizen-Initiated Polls” or CIPs. CIPs are offered as a response to the inability of citizens generally to express their opinions otherwise than through carefully orchestrated and typically simplistic and distinctly non-deliberative polls or surveys commissioned by the mainstream media or political parties and which are widely perceived as producing results that fail to capture the scope and intensity of opinions of large numbers of citizens.
I am not arguing that citizens groups should take over of law enforcement. There will be a continuing need for law enforcement professionals and for the specialized agencies that are charged with preventing crime and apprehending criminals. To this extent the online grassroots citizen participation that I envision will take place within the existing institutional framework. However, greatly expanded citizen engagement could improve law enforcement in such basic ways as enhancing prevention through greater victim and witness participation and, ultimately, by 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.
In my judgment, the foundations for wider citizen participation in law enforcement have already been laid. The efforts examined in Part II, including the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, evidence both the need for citizen involvement and the desire of citizens to become involved. As noted, these efforts have failed to live up to expectations for the reasons set out in Part II, including especially the fact that they have been too formalistic, too top down and too limited in scope. There is no reason, given existing and advancing communications technology, and the many tools explored in Part III for making widespread participation possible, why entire communities cannot provide input into law enforcement. It is only necessary that the natural and often deep citizen interest in law enforcement issues be translated into extended grassroots citizen activity. Bursts of citizen involvement in the political domain resulted from a growing self awareness of empowerment, founded on a belief that individual opinions matter and can be expressed and heard, and because of facilitating entities such as MoveOn.org have emerged to help citizens to turn their beliefs into action. The same thing can happen in the law enforcement context. Groups such as Cop Watch could be the MoveOns of law enforcement. They need only shift their focus away from simply monitoring police conduct and invite their members to turn their attention to what is needed to improve law enforcement and the administration of justice more generally.
In the introduction I suggested that grassroots online citizen involvement can transcend local boundaries. It should be apparent that skillful use of advanced communications technology makes this quite possible. Given that many law enforcement problems are not unique to particular locales but rather are of concern to citizens everywhere, the ability of citizens to communicate with other citizens who are separated geographically has great value. Moreover, although I chose to focus on criminal law enforcement, as I also indicated at the outset, greatly expanded citizen involvement could assist efforts to fight organized crime and even terrorist activity. 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. 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.
V. Conclusion
I have argued in this paper that not only is much greater citizen participation in law enforcement necessary to improve law enforcement (and the administration of justice more generally), but such expanded citizen participation is manifestly possible. The outburst of online grassroots citizen participation in the political sphere amply demonstrates that this is so. 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. 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. 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. With emergence of these new communities has come an empowerment that has the potential for transforming democracy. 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.
Appendix A
Dear MoveOn member,
The response to our petition on media monopoly has been enormous. In collaboration with Media Alliance, Global Exchange, and United for Peace and Justice, over 150,000 folks have signed in less than a week, and thousands more sign on every day. For an issue with little media coverage, it’s a clear sign that folks are outraged.
But despite growing opposition, FCC Chair Michael Powell seems intent on pushing through the new media rules. His plans, which were released to several media outlets this week, are as bad as we feared — and they now stand a good chance of becoming official policy.
We need to escalate. Since Chairman Powell won’t listen to the public, our Senators need to make him listen. The Senate Commerce Committee has the jurisdiction to hold hearings on and possibly delay the FCC rule change, but it won’t use that power without grassroots support.
Your Senator, John McCain, serves on the Commerce Committee and needs to hear from you today. Ask the Senator to stop the FCC’s rush to deregulation, hold hearings on the rule change, and work for a diverse, balanced, competitive, and fair media.
Please call your Senator now, at:
Senator John McCain
DC Phone: 202-224-2235
Please let us know when you’ve made your call at:
http://www.moveon.org/fcccall.html?id=1367-1242645-jbFa4tHk.1ajdteDJROCtg
Chairman Powell is trying to rush through these changes under cover of darkness. But the effects will be very visible: we’re moving toward a society in which a few big companies control the entire broadcast media. The Senate’s sleeping on the job: please make a call today and help wake them up.
Sincerely,
–Eli Pariser
MoveOn.org
May 15th, 2003
P.S. Here are a few good articles providing the latest details on this issue:
FCC CLOSE TO EASING MEDIA CAPS
GIANT FIRMS WANT TO OWN MORE OUTLETS
San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2003
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0512-01.htm
F.C.C. PREPARES TO LOOSEN RULES ON MEDIA OWNERSHIP
New York Times, May 12, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/business/media/13FCC.html
A NEW ERA FOR MEDIA FIRMS?
PUBLIC, PRIVATE INTERESTS CLASH AS REVISION OF OWNERSHIP RULES NEARS
Washington Post, May 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47349-2003May12.html.
Appendix B
Dear MoveOn member,
Usually we ask you to take an action, but today we’d like to take just a moment to reflect on where we’ve come together, and to take some measure of the impact of our efforts.
In just a little over a week, the Democratic convention will begin. The Democratic nominee, John Kerry, will finally get a chance to be heard directly by the American people, and the fight for the future of America will begin in earnest. We knew from the very start that the Bush administration and the right wing would pull out all the stops to discredit the Democratic nominee before he even appeared at the convention. They put everything they had into it, every dollar and every conceivable misleading ad, and they failed, surprising all the pundits and political operators. We now are facing a real contest – a real chance for change. And we should all take a moment to appreciate this victory.
With your incredible support, the efforts of the MoveOn.org Voter Fund have been a big part of this victory. This is not a partisan victory. It is a victory for truth and accountability over distortion. We’ve leveled the playing field so that opponents of administration policy have a fair chance in this election. Starting last October, over 160,000 MoveOn members gave more than $10 MILLION (!) to the Voter Fund to develop and run ads in battleground states telling the truth about the Bush administration. We’ve reached millions of people with these messages and helped shift the opinions the hundreds of thousands, on George Bush, and on the key issues we face. Below I’ve attached a report, with some hard figures, that shows how important this continuous drumbeat has been. With ads on health care, the Iraq war and on American priorities – some produced by MoveOn members themselves – we’ve kept the voice of the opposition strong and clear.
What’s most exciting about this victory is that it represents a sea change in how politics is done. Who would have guessed that small contributions would become more important than the big ones? Who would have guessed than an organization like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, driven by 2.4 million MoveOn members, would set the pace in addressing the key issues in this election?
Thank you for being a part of changing the way politics is done.
Sincerely,
–Wes Boyd and the MoveOn Voter Fund team
July 17th, 2004
Results of MoveOn.org Voter Fund Advertising Program
July 15, 2004
Wes Boyd
In October of last year, we asked MoveOn members if they would support an aggressive advertising program, to “get the truth out about the Bush administration” in battleground states. The response was overwhelming. We raised more than $10 million in small contributions from more than 160,000 MoveOn members. Together with $6 million in challenge grants from large contributors, this gave us a budget of almost $17 million for advertising. We engaged an excellent media firm (Zimmerman and Markman) and a research firm (Greenberg Quinlan Rosner) and developed a program to focus on five core states – Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, and West Virginia. To break out of the traditional mold, we also started an advertising contest, to bring in fresh ideas from MoveOn members themselves.
Our program is unusual in that we take issues that are very resonant with MoveOn members, and in fact may be issues highlighted by a MoveOn advocacy campaign, and test to see if those issues move people broadly across America. Again and again, this strategy turned up tremendously powerful messages. Our first ad of this kind, $87 Billion in Iraq, aired in December and was based on MoveOn’s Iraq campaign. We were skeptics of political advertising, and wanted to be certain that we were spending this money well, so we developed an elaborate testing strategy – far beyond what others do. Every ad was first tested in the real world in a test market, with a full run of the ad in that market, against results in a comparable control market. Most campaigns just do focus groups, which we’ve found unreliable. As an example of the power of these ads, here are the results of the $87B in Iraq ad:
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WOULD VOTE FOR
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Before Advertising
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After Advertising
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Democratic nominee
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45%
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48%
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George W. Bush
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44%
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40%
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The $87 Billion in Iraq ad was seen by almost 20,000,000 people, an average of 11 times each, in the five target states, over the two week period it ran. As a result, according to our polling, we saw a significant shift away from President Bush and his policies, especially his policy in Iraq. People clearly responded to this message and nearly a million people shifted their thinking about the President. They also changed their thinking about the war:
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FOREIGN POLICY
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Before Advertising
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After Advertising
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Different direction
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44%
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48%
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Bush direction
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40%
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38%
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We followed this ad with two ads about the Bush administration’s outrageous Medicare plans – Rug and State of the Union – which also really moved people in our testing. By that time, the BushIn30Seconds ad contest had yielded its winners and two of the finalists tested very well – the winner, Child’s Pay, and another finalist, Polygraph. Child’s Pay focuses on the tremendous burden the Bush administration is placing on future generations through its irresponsible tax cuts. Polygraph highlights President Bush’s misleading statements on Iraq. We placed these ads in the five core states in January and February. You can see all the ads placed by the MoveOn.org Voter Fund in battleground states here.
With these results, we now understood the incredible power of media to get out resonant messages, and we were very worried as we saw that the Bush campaign and others were likely to launch a media blitz in March, once the Democratic nominee was known, with the intention of a preemptive political strike against the new nominee and the administration’s opposition. We expanded our efforts to the entire seventeen battleground states at that key moment, and together with others, successfully blunted this unprecedented media blitz from the right-wing – almost $60M in March and April from the Bush campaign alone. In those keys weeks, we played our contest winning ad, Child’s Pay, and a new ad about the Bush administration’s attempt to reduce overtime pay – our Worker ad. The results: in June, national polling showed Senator Kerry actually leading Bush nationally by a couple points and leading by up to five points in the battleground states, an extraordinary result given the overwhelming resources the Bush campaign brought to bear.
Essentially, the Bush message didn’t resonate. And ours did. And with your help, these messages got out in these key states.
Since March, we’ve focused on a combined program with the Media Fund, to continue to keep up the pressure in five core states. We’ve just received the latest tracking polls, which now fully document the impact of our program over the last eight months. Key findings from Stan Greenberg team’s research include:
1. Our issue advertising has achieved deep and nearly universal penetration in these target states – greater than the recall of anti-Kerry or pro-Kerry advertising – despite the fact that there is more money behind other advertising.
2. In the target states, the presence of continuing opposition issue ads is producing less recall of the Bush campaign’s anti-Kerry advertising. Raising real issues in our ads has the effect of neutralizing the Bush campaign attack ads.
3. We are making gains on key issues related to the advertising, particularly Iraq, corporate influence and health care. The ads produced significant changes, compared to the control states and nationally, on Iraq, Bush’s corporate ties and health care and prescription drugs.
As part of the launch of each of these ads, we’ve typically run “earned media” campaigns with both national and local press. The PR campaigns amplify our online campaigns and have given MoveOn.org Voter Fund and MoveOn members extraordinary national impact and exposure in the last eight months. We believe this national presence has been a key part of establishing a strong opposition voice against the Bush Administration. Of course, this new prominence comes with its costs. The right-wing apparatus now has us on their radar – including Matt Drudge, Fox News, the Republican National Committee, and the Bush Campaign. They have launched a series of attacks to attempt to discredit and silence us. But they have failed.
One prong of this attack is the persistent attempt to characterize one of the 1500 entries in the BushIn30Seconds contest – the now infamous “Hitler ad” – as an ad somehow supported and aired by MoveOn. Of course, this is not true, and in fact the ad itself only appeared to the public at large on the RNC and Bush campaign web sites. While their consistent harping on this lie has gotten press, in the end it’s backfired. Most recently, the Bush Campaign itself ran an ad with Kerry, Gore, Dean and Hitler, referencing the contest ad, and they came under heavy criticism. In another attack, right-wing partisans launched a campaign intended to shut down the MoveOn.org Voter Fund itself through the Federal Election Commission and to chill contributions from big and small contributors. Again, they failed, and support for MoveOn and others opposing the administration has been very robust, especially from the new small contributors many organizations are reaching through the Internet. The bottom line is that the attacks have raised the profile of MoveOn and opposition to the Bush administration in general, and this prominence helps us every day in getting out our message.
We are continually grateful for the incredible support and trust extended to us by you and other MoveOn members. We’re great optimists, because we’re in touch with millions of people who are working to make a difference. We’re also optimistic because the work is yielding strong results. America is hearing the truth about the Bush administration. Now it’s time to drive it home. Soon we’ll let you know what’s next in our campaign to take back America. But for now, we just want to thank you for making these results possible.
Subscription Management:
This is a message from MoveOn.org Voter Fund. To remove yourself (William E. Boyd) from this list, please visit our subscription management page at:
http://moveon.org/s?i=3114-1242645-_8mCxOlfdv2WY5IOf2utfA
There is an abundance of literature making the point that our system is ailing. Among the efforts the authors have found most useful are Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (University of California Press, 1984) (Part I Thin Democracy); Robert Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution (2001); Debating Deliberative Democracy, edited by James Fishkin & Paul Laslett (Blackwell Press 2003) (Introduction and Ch. 1, Bruce Ackerman & James Fishkin, “Deliberation Day”; David Held, Models of Democracy (2nd ed. 1996); James Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell University 1998); Charles Lewis, The Buying of the President (Center for Public Integrity, 2003); Gregory Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2001); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone– The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2001). See also, William E. Boyd, Out Of The Darkness: Massive Online Citizen Participation As A Cure For An Ailing Democracy available at http://www.law.arizona.edu/depts/boyd/ailing.htm.
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