Digilantism: An analysis of crowdsourcing and the Boston marathon bombings

Paper:

Nhan, J., Huey, L., & Broll, R. (2017). Digilantism: An analysis of crowdsourcing and the Boston marathon bombings. The British Journal of Criminology, 57(2), 341-361.

Discussion leader: Leanna

Summary:

The article explores digilantism, or crowdsourced web-sleuthing, in the wake of the Boston marathon bombing. They focus on police-citizen collaboration – highlighting various crowdsourcing efforts done by the police and some successes and “failures” of online vigilantism.

The authors theoretically frame their paper around nodal governance – a theoretical marriage between security and social network analysis. In this framing, the authors combine various works. Overall, following the logic of network analysis, the theory understands organizations or security actors as nodes in a decentralized structure. The nodes (or actors) (potentially) have associations and work with each other (edges) within the network, such as police corresponding with private security forces or a Reddit community sharing information to the police. Each node has the potential to have varying degrees (weights) of capital (i.e., economic, political, social, cultural, or symbolic) that can be shared between the nodes.

The authors use threaded discussion as well as thematic analysis to examine various threads from Reddit about the Boston Marathon bombing, coming up with 20 thematic categories. For this paper, the authors are mainly interested in their theme “investigation-related information” (pg. 346). In the results, the authors note that most comments were general in nature. Some sub-themes within the investigation category included 1) public security assets, 2) civilian investigations online, 3) mishandling of clues, and 4) police work online.

The first subcategory—public security assets—discusses the vast professional backgrounds of users on Reddit and their ability to contribute based on this experience and knowledge (e.g., military forensic). In this section, the authors raise the point about the occurrence of parallel investigations and a general lack of communication between the police and web-sleuths (mainly on the part of the police). They speculate this disconnection could stem from the police subculture or legal concerns with incorporating web-sleuths into investigations.

In the next sub-theme—civilian investigations—the authors take note of the unofficial role that Reddit users had in the investigation of the Boston Marathon Bombing. This included identifying photographs of suspects and blast areas, as well as conducting background checks on suspects. Nhan and colleagues referred to this as “virtual crime scene investigation” (pg.350). In this section, the authors expanded upon the silo-effect of parallel investigations. They noted that the relationship between the police and web-sleuths were uni-directional, with users encouraging each other to report to the police with information.

In the third sub-theme—mishandling of clues—the authors focus on two consequences of web-sleuthing: 1) being suspicious of innocent acts; and 2) misidentifying potential suspects. In particular, the authors highlight the fixation of users on people carrying backpacks and the misidentification of Sunil Tripathi as a potential suspect in the bombing.

In the final sub-theme—police work online—the authors highlight police efforts to harness web-sleuths either by providing correct information or by asking people to provide police with videos from the event. The authors noted that this integration of police into the Reddit community was a way to regain control of the situation and the information being spread.

In the conclusion, the authors conclude with various policy recommendations, such as assigning police officers to be moderators on sites such as Reddit or 4Chan. In addition, the authors do acknowledge the geographical and potential cultural differences between their two examples of police crowdsource use (Boston vs. Vancouver). Lastly, the authors again note that the police have not used the expertise of the crowd.

Reflection:

When reading the paper, numerous things came to my mind. Below is a list of some of them:

1. In the background section, the authors mentioned an article by Ericson and Haggerty (1997) that classifies the four eras of policing: political, reform, community and information. Other authors have defined this fourth era as the national security era (Willard, 2006) or militarized era (Hawdon, 2016). Hawdon (2016) argues in an ASC conference presentation, for example, that a pattern is occurring among the eras (see the first five rows below). In particular, the organizational structure, approach to citizenry, functional purpose and tactical approach of law enforcement flip flops between each era. Thinking forward, I foresee a coming era of crowdsourcing police as a continuation of the pattern Hawdon identifies (see the last row). This style would be decentralized (dispersed among the various actors), clearly integrated into the community, focused on more than law enforcement, and would intervene informally in the community members’ lives (via open-communication online). Therefore, fitting neatly into the cyclical pattern we see in policing (Hawdon, 2016).

Note: functional: “a narrow function (i.e., law enforcement) or serving the community by fulfilling numerous and broad functions” Hawdon (2016) pg. 5; tactical: legalistic = “stresses the law-enforcement function of policing” p.5 service = intervenes frequently in the lives of residents, but officers do so informally” pg. 5.

2. Nhan and colleagues highlight various “police-citizen collaborations” (pg. 344) with regards to social media, such as crowdsourcing face identification of the 2011 Stanley cup riots and disseminating information via Twitter. But, in many ways, these police engagement in social media appear to lack innovation. The former is like posting wanted photos on telephone poles and the latter disseminating info via a popular newspaper. Yes, the media has changed and therefore the scale of the impact has shifted, but the traditional structure hasn’t changed. The other “police-citizen collaboration” (pg. 344) that was mentioned was collecting information. This is not collaboration. In the example of Facebook, this is simply using the largest repository of available biometric data that people are willing give away for free. It’s becoming the new and improved governmental surveillance dataset, but there is nothing formally collaborative about citizen use of Facebook (even if Facebook might collaborate with law enforcement at times).
3. The paper is missing crucial details to fully understand the authors’ numerical figures. For example, the authors noted that only a small number of individuals (n=16) appear to be experts. It would have been great to put this figure into context; how many distinct users posted in the amount of posts that were analyzed. Without a larger sense of the total n that the authors are dealing with, assessments of the external validity (generalizability) of the findings becomes difficult.
4. The authors frame their analysis around nodal governance and the large-scale nodal security network. The guiding theory itself needs to be expanded on. The authors allude to this need but do not make the full connection. In the paper, the police and Reddit are simply being considered as the nodes. Instead, the network needs to acknowledge the organization (e.g., police or Reddit) and also the individual users. This, if my memory serves me correct, is called a multilevel network. In this model, users (nodes in one group) are connected to organizations (nodes in another group) and relationships (or edges) exist between (among actors) and within groups (organizations). The authors allude to this need when mentioning the wide breadth of knowledge and expertise that posters bring when doing web-sleuthing on Reddit, but stop there. Reddit users can be connected to the military (as mentioned) and have access to the capital that that institution brings. These individual users are then connected to two organization structures within the security network.
5. Lastly, it was not surprising that the authors noted a “mislabelling of innocent actions as suspicious activities” (pg. 353); however, it was surprising that it was underneath the label of “the mishandling of clues” (pg. 353). In addition, the mislabelling of activities is not unique to web sleuths. I was expecting a conversation about mislabeling and its connection to a fearful/risk society. This mislabelling is all around us. Mislabelling happens in schools, for example, when nursery staff think a 4-year-old boy’s drawing of a cucumber is a cooker bomb, when the police think tourists taking photos are terrorists or when police arrest a man thinking his kitty litter was meth.

Questions

1. Is crowdsourcing the next policing era?
2. What drives police hesitation for police-citizen collaboration?
3. Is police reluctance to engage in crowdsourcing harming future innovative methods of crime-fighting or police-community engagement?
4. What are some ways police can better integrate into the community for investigation?
5. Does the nodal governance theory fit with the crowdsourcing analysis?