Cambridge is applying a civic assembly, an idea little-used in the United States, to assess the thorny problem of adopting the surveillance technology ShotSpotter. Experts say such assemblies can build trust in government decisions. 

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ShotSpotter, an acoustic detection system deployed to improve public safety response times when shots are fired, has roiled the city, with voices both strongly against it and loudly in favor. City Council voted to stop using the technology in May but on Aug. 3 a policy order was passed restoring the system for 90 days, and establishing a civic assembly to assess it. The city has 90 days to create a plan for the civic assembly and initiate it, according to Jeremy Warnick, the city’s media relations director. Currently, the community engagement office is working on planning and finding partnerships to create a civic assembly.

A core part of civic assemblies is bringing together randomly selected community residents — known formally as sortition — to discuss public policy and provide the government with community insight and recommendations. Assemblies give people the opportunity to listen to each other in a way that other public forums like city council meetings don’t, said Jane Mansbridge, a political scientist and professor at Harvard University. 

“My experience with these assemblies is that the citizens listen hard to one another, take one another very seriously, and very often bond across political, ethnic, and class lines as they engage seriously together on a common problem,” Mansbridge said in an email. 

In Europe civic assemblies or their smaller counterpart, citizens panels, have been a frequent go-to for lawmakers. Mansbridge said the assemblies help residents gain more trust in their elected governments and the legitimacy of decision-making, because members of the community make the suggestions, not the elected politicians. 

One U.S. city that has used a civic assembly is Lexington, Ky., which hosted one in March to get resident feedback on a new government charter. Preparation for that assembly took three years, local officials said. The city council in Lexington designated a local non-profit working to boost civic health, CivicLex, to design the process and fundraise for it, including coming up with money to give stipends to the assembly participants. 

“Assemblies are incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming and expensive,” said Kit Anderson, CivicLex’s deputy director. “You want to give yourself enough time that you’re doing it right, because you want it to be worth it.”

CivicLex knew city charters did not draw a lot of public interest, said Anderson. A civic assembly could help spur engagement, and it would also help draw new voices into public discussion.  

“It can be frustrating to always hear from the same people when you’re asking for input on local government issues,” Anderson said. 

To create a microcosm of Lexington’s community, CivicLex sent out 10,000 postcards to randomly selected residential addresses in Lexington. The postcards linked to a demographics survey. The survey data was fed into a program called Panalot, which generated between 120 to 130 potential panels of residents that met demographic criteria similar to Lexington overall. To ensure the final panel was randomly selected, CivicLex drew from a bingo cage. 

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The 30 assembly members met eight times in March, then submitted their suggestions to the city council. Despite the intense schedule, Anderson said it was not difficult to get people to show up for the discussions, because the organization had worked to reduce the barriers for participation. Members were offered participation stipends of $1,200 each, along with transportation stipends and childcare stipends. “The other reason a lot of people kept showing up is because it mattered,” Anderson said. “They had legitimate decision-making power. They were locked in.”

Akron, Ohio, started a civic assembly to discuss the city’s housing crisis. It worked with Unify Akron, part of Unify America, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to solve civic challenges through collaborative problem solving. Unify Akron’s Morgan Lasher, who leads its U.S. Democracy Leagues team, said it approached sortition differently than CivicLex, creating outreach teams that contacted residents to discuss what a civic assembly was and how they felt about the housing situation. From those interviews, invitations were sent out. 

“Civic assemblies move at the speed of trust,” Lasher said. “If you have networks already created inside the city and inside your community … it can move quite quickly.”

It took about 16 months of planning for the civic assembly in Akron, and the sessions ran for 10 weeks.

Even with all the groundwork, both Anderson and Lasher said the civic assemblies still initially faced public distrust. Lasher described assembly members coming in with skepticism and looking more reserved during the first session.

But assembly members quickly saw how different the civic assembly was from city council meetings. In Akron, Lasher and her team used the first four to five hours of their session to build trust with assembly members.

While both of these assemblies were organized in a much longer window of time than Cambridge has, Anderson said the time to create and carry out a civic assembly varies widely. She has seen some done in a weekend. She spoke highly of how they worked.

“It was a pretty incredible experience,” Anderson said. “Assemblies can be really powerful. They can build back a lot of faith.”

This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

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