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The Power of the Crowd
Police Crowdsourcing
In an electric information environment . . . [t]oo many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
âMarshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore1
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their neighbor! Repeat! Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their neighbor!
âDeputy Barney Fife
On August 24, 1985, a man broke into the home of Bill Carns and Inez Erickson, a young couple living in Mission Viejo, California. After pulling out a pistol and shooting Bill in the head, the intruder tied up Inez and raped her repeatedly. Hours later, as her attacker fled the scene, Inez pulled herself up to the bedroom window just in time to catch a glimpse of him driving away in an orange Toyota station wagon. Because Inez was able to provide police with a description of the automobile and a partial license plate number, the California State Police began scouring the area for the orange Toyota. When the car was found abandoned four days later, police were able to pull a fingerprint from the car, which they traced to convicted thief and local drug addict Richard Ramirez. Ramirez had a mug shot on file with the Los Angeles Police Department, and detectives confirmed that he fit the physical description that Inez and other sexual assault survivors in the area had given. On August 30, Los Angeles County sheriff Sherman Block announced that they had identified Ramirez as the notorious âNight Stalkerâ who had carried out more than a dozen home invasion-murders in the preceding three months: âAll police agencies in California and surrounding states have been notified. . . . You cannot escape. Every law officer and every citizen now knows exactly what you look like and who you are.â2 At the request of the LAPD, Ramirezâs mug shot was emblazoned on television screens and newspapers, and radio stations warned listeners to be on the lookout for the lanky, Chicano male with long hair and bad teeth. Unaware that he had suddenly become a local celebrity, that morning Ramirez shot up some cocaine in a public restroom before walking into a liquor store. When the storeowner recognized Ramirez from a photograph on the front page of a newspaper, he repeatedly screamed, âEl matador! El matador!â (âThe killer!â) as Ramirez ran out into the street. Surrounded by photographs of himself on newsstands and TV screens, he fled from the neighborhood on foot, trailed by a small mob of citizens who were shouting that he was the Night Stalker. As Ramirez tried to escape, he ran across a highway into an East Los Angeles neighborhood, where he tried to steal a car. But he had no such luck; the mob chased him for several blocks and finally pinned him down until cops arrived on the scene. His photograph had been released to the public only a few hours earlier.
The Richard Ramirez case illustrates the central role that media technologies like newspapers and television play in modern police manhunts. If journalists and the police had not tapped into the crowdsourcing potential of these media, Ramirez might have had the chance to kill again. These crowdsourcing technologies, in fact, have played a central role in policing for hundreds of years. Before the advent of print, citizens used trumpets and rattles to alert their neighbors to the presence of intruders or thieves. Then print technologies like the âhue and cryâ declaration, which was an early ancestor of the Wanted poster, pulled citizens into the policing apparatus by alerting them to rewards, crimes, stolen goods, and potential threats. Cultivating what Rachel Hall calls the âvigilant viewer,â3 throughout American history these crowdsourcing technologies have taken diverse forms, including roguesâ galleries, police gazettes, âMissing Childâ photographs on milk cartons, popular television shows like Americaâs Most Wanted, and now, in the digital age, police-affiliated social media accounts and online community forums.
In a recent public service announcement, John Walsh, the former host of Americaâs Most Wanted, provides an important insight into the impetus behind these police crowdsourcing projects: âA police department is only as good as the people it serves. Thatâs why the good cops working the streets . . . need your eyes, your ears, and every ounce of support you can give them. Itâs a partnership.â4 In this video, Walsh places the responsibility for surveillance squarely on the citizen, who is instructed less in community responsibility than in loyalty to the police apparatus.5 As neoliberal economic austerity has cut departmental budgets to the bone, police crowdsourcing programs have become a Band-Aid for local authorities who promote civic participation in lieu of tackling the larger structural issues that lead to crime and social alienation. In a process that has grown in intensity since the financial crisis of 2008, many jurisdictions have adopted âtechnologyââespecially crowdsourcing technologyâas the answer to crime and countless other social ills, thus forestalling important conversations about the causes and reproduction of crime, violence, and social injustice.
This is a troubling development, even for those of us who are grateful that there are systems in place that allow communities to unite against predators like Richard Ramirez. As criminologist Gary T. Marx has recognized, these efforts âdraw on the higher civic tradition of democratic participation, self-help, and community. They may also deter. Yet there is something troubling about them.â6 Indeed, there is a troubling difference between journalists and police agencies collaborating to publicize the I.D. of a serial killer, and, on the other hand, police departments publicizing petty crimes on Facebook and Pinterest in order to increase arrest statistics and generate fine revenues. The disparity between these cases illustrates how police crowdsourcing, despite its democratic, community-friendly veneer, can have questionable social consequences. This chapter will focus on some of these negative effects, because crowdsourcing has enjoyed a rather appreciative reception from scholars and the public at large. Most analysts have accepted crowdsourcing as a more or less new and positive phenomenon that helps businesses and other institutions quickly solve problems.7 Arguing that it âis just one manifestation of a larger trend toward greater democratization in commerce,â Jeff Howe, who coined the term âcrowdsourcingâ in a 2006 Wired magazine article, suggests: âContrary to the foreboding, dystopian vision that the Internet serves primarily to isolate people from each other, crowdsourcing uses technology to foster unprecedented levels of collaboration and meaningful exchanges.â8 For Howe and other advocates of crowdsourcing and similar social media trends, these technologies naturally give rise to collaboration and democratic participation. However, the history of police crowdsourcing paints a different picture, one that shows how this collaboration is fostered and often manipulated by the police. This chapter, therefore, will call into question much of the received wisdom on crowdsourcing by making three basic assertions: first, that crowdsourcing is anything but new; second, that crowdsourcing is media-dependent; and third, that crowdsourcing can have negative social impacts that go far beyond diminished data quality and exploitive labor arrangements.9 Thus while Howe, Clay Shirky,10 and other experts focus on its democratizing potential, it is important to point out, with Daniel Trottier, that these citizen empowerment schemes often serve as simply a distributed expression of raw state power.11 The current state of police crowdsourcing, I suggest, demonstrates how citizensâ bodies and their social relationships are continuously remade into raw resources by a policing apparatus that has come to rely on a vigilant, responsibilized public.
This chapter analyzes several key innovations in crowdsourcing technology that have allowed the police to cultivate and organize this vigilant neighborly conduct.12 Police agencies have always used ânewâ media to carry out their work, and these new technologies have inevitably created new relationships between the police and the communities they serve. This brings up a number of questions about lateral surveillance, communication, and the nature of crowdsourced community responsibility, particularly in the digital age. For example, how do new media technologies give rise to new forms of control, state exploitation, and/or democratic access? As crowdsourcing technologies encourage citizens to become more active in policing their communities, does that participation facilitate the construction of a more just social order? Does this form of public participation create more productive and sympathetic relationships between the police and their constituencies, or between the watchers and the watched? However we might answer these questions, one thing is increasingly clear: at the present convergence of digital culture and late liberal politics, community responsibility and self-entrepreneurism have given the police apparatus a rich new social milieu in which to engage, organize, and deploy the seeing/saying bodies of its constituents. And, just as important, theyâve given citizens and resistance movements new avenues for crowdsourcing their outrage at police brutality and other abuses of the state.
Crowdsourcing in Police History
While exacerbated by recent trends in neoliberal public policy, crowdsourcing is hardly a new phenomenon in police history. Indeed, we should resist overestimating the uniqueness of neoliberalism and its methods of social regulation, particularly when many historical examples foreshadow neoliberalismâs signature synthesis of political economy and individual empowerment. In fact, although today our notions of policing are dominated by its contemporary form as a sovereign institutionâcomplete with salaried officers, specialized technologies, and distinct legal privilegesâthis brand of professional policing is a historical anomaly that has been prominent for less than two hundred years.13 In Europe and North America, community-based citizen patrols comprised the dominant form of law enforcement until the rise of the modern police force in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.14 And in these early days, policing was coordinated through crowdsourcing initiatives that, in fact, functioned much like Americaâs Most Wanted and similar programs of today.
As police historians Robert Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux have argued, to understand the emergence of Americaâs community policing tradition requires an excursion into British policing history, particularly into the forms of community-based policing that colonial America inherited from Great Britain.15 This is an especially good starting place for us, as it illustrates how citizens and sovereign institutions have long struggled over how the population should participate in the policing of its communities. The roots of this community-policing tradition can be found in the days of Anglo-Saxon England. When the Anglo-Saxons conquered and settled Britain between the fifth and seventh centuries, they brought an ancient Germanic system of tribal government and community justice. This system was organized around the local community, the âhundred,â each of which comprised a district of roughly one hundred households. The leader of each hundred, its elder, was responsible for judging disputes and pursuing criminal justice. Since court was held only once each season, most parties, too impatient or independent to wait for official justice, would pursue criminals themselves. At this time, community members were still permitted to seek justice without appealing to an elder, so law enforcement was a decidedly local affair. In lieu of an organized police force, neighbors would frequently band together, pursuing criminals and dispensing punishment without the approval of a sovereign official or written laws.
While we should be careful to avoid mythologizing the communal nature of Anglo-Saxon justice procedures, it is generally accepted that the Norman Conquest introduced a number of important reforms to this system.16 Upon the Normansâ colonization of England in the eleventh century, they introduced new methods of financial extraction into Anglo-Saxon communal arrangements. For example, in the early years of the conquest, William I implemented a community-policing system that manipulated the Anglo-Saxonsâ structures of community justice.17 For a number of reasons, among them to prevent the assassination of Norman officials, the Normansâwho were heavily outnumbered by the native Anglo-Saxonsâlevied severe, collective penalties for criminal acts. This new arrangement transformed the traditional rationalities of Anglo-Saxon communal policing, giving rise to two key political innovations: first, the financial and political enrichment of the Norman ruling class, and secondâand more importantly, for our purposesâthe more or less seamless integration of the conquered Anglo-Saxons into the machinery of their own control. This development signals a long trend in the self-disciplining and responsibilization of local populations via citizen policing, indicating for police historian William Alfred Morris a significant moment in âthe union of police and mutual responsibility.â18
One of the harsher aspects of this responsibilization was the âfrankpledgeâ system, which was a primitive police crowdsourcing arrangement. By imposing collective financial responsibility for the apprehension of criminals and the recovery of stolen goods, the frankpledge effectively conscripted the entire English populace into the policing apparatus. In fact, all members of a village were held financially responsible for the criminal acts of their neighbors, a development that eventually led Anglo-Saxon locals to form ad hoc policing networks. In the thirteenth century Edward I officially sanctioned the verbal âhue and cryâ method of crime response and patrol organization, a method that would survive in certain forms well into the nineteenth century. Once an individual witnessed a crime, he was required to chase the perpetrator with a loud, accusatory âhue and cryâ that would ring out through the community. (Women would typically produce cries from within their homes.) As these shouts alerted other citizens who would join the manhunt, the crew would chase the criminal and return her or him to a constable for internment, thereby releasing the collective bail imposed upon their community.19 However, if the criminal eluded the posse and ran to a neighboring village, the inhabitants of both villagesânow facing the threat of defaulting on their frankpledgeâwould strive to apprehend the fleer, forming an ever-larger mob of civilian police.20
Eventually, various crowdsourcing media facilitated the hue and cry: horns, rattles, and other technologies were used to deputize local citizens and allow for the organization of their bodies across time and space. Mobile aural technologies transformed oral hue-and-cry and watch-and-ward patrols, allowing for improved communications between households and sometimes even between isolated communities. Sir Frederick Pollock, a nineteenth-century police historian who also served as England and Walesâs chief law enforcement officer, described how the horn, which was first introduced into English patrols in the fourteenth century, occupied a central role in citizen policing: when a hue and cry was raised, neighbors would âturn out with the bows, arrows, knives, that they are bound to keep, and besides much shouting, there will be horn-blowing; the âhueâ will be horned from vill to vill.â21 All citizens, as potential deputies, were required to own a variety of weapons that could help them serve in their capacity as the citizen police. As important as the weapons, however, was the medium of the hue: the horn. According to Pollock, the horn allowed for ...