On Monday, the city of Cambridge held a lottery drawing to determine which residents would advise councillors on the city’s use of surveillance technology, including the gunshot detection software, ShotSpotter.
After over 400 residents responded to the city’s invitation to form a civic assembly in September, the city generated 1,000 possible panels of 40 residents, which were arranged with demographic diversity and experience with gun violence in mind.
At City Hall, where officials would randomly select one of those panels, the mood was anticipatory.
“Today is a really historic day for our city,” said Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui from the dais at Sullivan Chamber. “This is the first municipal civic assembly process in Massachusetts and one of the first in our country. That alone is worth celebrating.”
At the center of the chamber was a table with three ball cages with a rotating handle — the kind you might use for bingo. Inside each were colored balls with a number written on them with a marker.
After remarks from City Manager Yi-An Huang and Director of Community Engagement Jackson Price, Siddiqui walked to the table to select the numbers of the chosen panel. After a false start with its rotating handle, the first cage released the ball with the initial number: six. The second cage shot the second ball onto the floor — a two. The last cage tumbled the last ball without incident, revealing the final number: eight.
When the city’s community engagement team typed 628 into its system, the identification numbers of that panel’s 40 participants were projected onto the chamber’s display screen.
The city will soon contact these residents to confirm their involvement. While their names are not public yet, the city shared demographic information about the chosen panel immediately.
The panel represents the city’s ethnic makeup, but has an intentional increase of Black residents at 23 percent “due to focus areas and lived experience,” the city said.
By design, the city factored in experience with gun violence. While 50 percent of the panel has no experience with gun violence, 15 percent has personally experienced gun violence, 18 percent has had a family member or someone close to them who has experienced gun violence and 18 percent said gun violence has affected their neighborhood or community. (The city rounded all numbers to the nearest whole percent, so the panel percentages may not equal 100.)
The city rounded all numbers to the nearest whole percent, so the panel percentages may not equal 100.
“We start with the representation goals that we have,” said Bailey Flanigan, an assistant professor of computer science at MIT who is advising the city on civic assemblies pro bono. “[Meeting representation goals] is the number one priority. After that, we try to be as random as we can.”
Showcasing the process via a public lottery draw is “important,” said Flanigan. “The alternative is going on a computer and doing a random draw of people [but that] doesn’t let the public confirm that the selection process was random.”
“This way, you can see the physical randomness in front of you.”
A tragic precursor
Before the panel was announced, one city employee reminded the room of the reason it was organized in the first place.
“The question we’re dealing with, the topic we’re dealing with, is quite sensitive,” said Price, who oversaw the community engagement process for the city’s first civic assembly. “A lot of tragic circumstances led us here today and it’s important we treat the topic with care.”
In May, councillors voted to stop using ShotSpotter after surveillance concerns were raised by local residents and privacy activists. However, when Cambridge resident and Department of Public Works employee Xavier Bautista was fatally shot on July 4 near Sennott Park but not found until a pedestrian called 911 around an hour after the shooting, calls to restore ShotSpotter revived debate about whether it might have prevented his death.
Residents and councillors who wanted to see ShotSpotter turned back on criticized the city for ignoring Black and brown residents’ concerns about crime in neighborhoods like The Port, which has seen higher rates of violent crime.
In August, councillors temporarily reinstated ShotSpotter and called for a civic assembly of citizens to continue deliberations on the future of the gunshot detection system and video surveillance cameras in Cambridge.
The invitation
In mid-September, the city randomly mailed 15,000 Cambridge households invitations to participate in the civic assembly – reaching more than a quarter of the city’s 57,000 households.
Any Cambridge resident who received an invitation could apply as long as they were at least 16 years old. Exceptions included anyone involved with the work of the civic assembly, including current elected officials and their staff, and employees or representatives involved in advising Cambridge about surveillance technology.
Members of different city departments, including the Community Safety Department and Civic Outreach Squad, knocked on doors of some of those households, encouraging one member of each invited household to sign up.
Price said he was encouraged when the first resident the team visited “had not only heard about the civic assembly but had already signed up to volunteer and was excited that we were going door-to-door.”
“That was a green flag in terms of our efforts paying off,” he said.
Price said some of the challenges in launching the civic assembly process weren’t in educating the public, but in “moving an institution to run something that it hasn’t run before.” This included staffing a hotline, creating a webpage, producing social videos, and geocoding 15,000 mailers.
Additionally, Price said while most cities that have run civic assemblies spent four to six weeks recruiting, Cambridge’s process lasted only two and a half weeks. The expedited timeline was geared toward providing guidance about ShotSpotter to the City Council by December.
Of the households invited, Price said that more than 400 people applied across all 13 of Cambridge’s neighborhoods. He said the 3 percent response rate was “pretty typical of what we see in other civic assemblies across the country and the world.”
The process was designed, in part, by the nonprofit FIDE, which has assisted the civic assembly process in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Lexington, Ky. It can take many months to lay the groundwork for these discussions. In Akron, for example, it took 16 months of planning to organize a civic assembly to discuss the city’s housing crisis for 10 weeks.
Future deliberations
This week, the city will contact the residents on the selected panel to confirm their involvement. Their names will be shared on the day of the first meeting on Oct. 24.
Not everyone contacted may be able to participate, and some attrition is expected over the course of the process. To maintain the size of the group and balance of experiences, the city will also contact multiple alternates who will be paid a small amount for showing up on the first day in case there are no-shows.
“Regardless of who drops out, we’re going to be able to maintain pretty good representation of all the perspectives we really wanted,” said Flanigan.
The assembly will meet for seven hours each day on Oct. 24, Nov. 7, Nov. 21, and Dec. 5. Participants must commit to attending each session to receive a $1,000 stipend, and will be provided child and elder care, transportation assistance, interpretation services, and other accommodations.
Although the city said a lot of effort went into the sortition — the random selection process — there is much more ahead.
FIDE will put together the programming for each session, which will cover how surveillance technologies work, convene experts and residents representing different perspectives and experiences, and host discussions regarding these technologies’ cost, effectiveness, and concerns.
The sessions will be open to the public.
“I think we’re in the first leg of a 4×400-meter race and we still have three legs to go,” Price said.
Correction: This article was updated to accurately reflect FIDE North America’s role in the civic assembly process. The nonprofit helped design the process, but did not implement it in Cambridge, Akron or Lexington.
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