I love living in Minneapolis. But the city has its problems. The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked global outrage. Here in Minneapolis last summer, an angry mob burned down a police station and vandals wrecked many neighborhoods, including mine. This week, in the shadow of the Derek Chauvin trial, being held to determine the former officer's legal culpability in Floyd's death, a 20-year-old Black man named Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer identified as Kim Potter in Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb.
This latest killing provoked new outrage. Again, my local pharmacy was busted up and looted. So was my local gas station. And my dad's bank. Though nowhere near the intensity of last year's rioting, this latest round of civil unrest was met with a massive show of force from the authorities. Military-style armored vehicles rolled through my neighborhood as business owners scrambled to screw plywood over their glass storefronts. A 7pm curfew was announced.
Shortly before Wright was killed, I sat down with @kommienezuspadt and @lovejoy to think about ways blockchain technology might be harnessed to help repair the relationship between Minneapolis residents and police by realigning reputational incentives. Then I published an article about the idea we came up with and started receiving great feedback about it. Here, some of the idea's most important parts are considered in more detail.
Community Approval Badge (CAB) System
The community approval badge (CAB) is an instrument designed to facilitate decentralized production of public approval data. When embodied as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on a public blockchain, CABs allow this data to be produced in a secure and transparent manner. Note that this terminology is preliminary, and calling it a community approval token (CAT) is also an option.
The CAB system consists of a minimum of six components:
- A network of network participants.
- A blockchain that supports user issued assets, such as Ethereum, EOS, WAX, or Waves.
- A list or database of the entities to be rated. Some CAB implementations require blockchain wallet addresses to be associated with these entities.
- A CAB issuance agreement. CABs may be issued by a central authority or by network participants according to agreed-upon rules.
- CAB tokens, likely issued as NFTs, distributed to network participants.
- A website + app that tracks and reports system information, such as CAB possession or data entered into the mutable data fields of individual CABs.
- Some implementations would also require a smart contract to manage assignment of CABs.
City Police Use Case
There are mechanisms in place for providing police with negative feedback. These mechanisms might be imperfect, but they do exist. A CAB system creates a new mechanism for providing positive feedback about public safety officers. It does this by allowing the residents of a jurisdiction to publicly signal their approval of individual police officers using a CAB token, likely embodied as an NFT.
The public approval metric generated by the CAB system would have many uses. Local media could use it to publish weekly or monthly stories celebrating exemplary officers. Residents could use it to determine which particular officers have conducted themselves in a satisfactory or problematic manner. The absence of CABs or a sharp decline in an officer's number of CABs may warrant attention. It could trigger a performance review within the department, an action by city government, a media report, or a response from a community group. In a city the size of Minneapolis, such a system could succeed even if only a small fraction of the population participated.
Centralized vs Decentralized
There are two primary approaches to establishing this type of CAB system. The first approach is centralized. It might include a city government creating blockchain wallets for all city residents and populating each of these wallets with one CAB for every city police officer. Residents would claim their wallets and then assign CABs to individual officers' wallets to signal approval following an interaction. This assignment could be withdrawn at any time, which has implications for implementation. The city would operate a centralized website + app to monitor the network and report its data.
A public safety CAB system could also be established in a decentralized manner. This approach would involve city residents creating their own wallets and registering their wallet addresses in a public repository. Once registered, residents could issue their own CABs as needed. By utilizing the mutable field type in the AtomicAssets NFT specification, it would be possible to add an officer's badge number to a CAB NFT or remove this number from the NFT subsequently, signaling approval or the absence of approval in the system without requiring the NFTs to be transferred around. A website + app would keep track of all of the data, but this would be built and maintained by civil society rather than by government.
The centralized approach would likely be successful, but it would be expensive, both financially and politically. The decentralized approach on its own might not produce a network of city residents large enough to make the CAB system worthwhile. If accounts creation and CAB issuance were decentralized while the website + app was operated by city government, the overall cost of establishing and maintaining the system could be minimized. Thus a hybrid approach shows promise.
Stakeholder Support
Importantly, such a system could only work with broad support from its stakeholders. Perhaps most importantly, the police would have to actively support it by providing and maintaining a list of officer profile pics and badge numbers, as well as by providing badge numbers to community members during interactions. Technically, an officer database could also be generated with images and badge numbers collected by community members without police support, but collecting this data in this way seems likely to undermine the underlying purpose of the CAB system, which is to improve the relationship between police and the community.
A successful CAB system would also probably require substantive support from city government. Such support would include providing funds for the website + app and a public relations campaign. Ideally, this would coincide with endorsements from businesses and the nonprofit sector. All of these things together might be able to generate sufficient support from city residents, who may be hesitant to participate in a CAB system for a variety of reasons. If any stakeholder group withdrew support, the system could break or vanish.
From Idea to Initiative
Everything about this idea is tentative and contingent on stakeholder support. Whether to call the approval badges CABs or CATs is an open question. So is the matter of which blockchain would be the best fit. So far, I've been looking at WAX. Based on preliminary conversations with experts, it looks like a CAB system could be developed on WAX for around $100k, not including the potential cost of creating 400k+ new WAX wallets. A different version of a CAB system could run on virtual NFTs minted as a user issued asset with zero decimals on Waves, with an initial minimum cost in the neighborhood of $80k. Note that these costs are likely to balloon once city government gets involved.
Right now, it's just me and my friends pursuing this idea and we all have other jobs. But personally, I find this idea compelling enough to warrant further investigation. I'm talking with blockchain developers and have reached out to my contacts in the nonprofit sector. Locally, most of my contacts are preoccupied with the immediate security/civil rights situation, but hopefully things will calm down soon. In the mean time, the next step toward turning this idea into an initiative is to solicit stakeholder feedback for use in some kind of definitive document that could be passed around the community.
Regardless of whether or not this idea moves forward, the current state of affairs in Minneapolis needs fixing. The population loots and vandalizes to show their disapproval of police, who respond with displays of unaccountable military force. Bad actors in this equation are not incentivized to change their behavior. They are incentivized to remain anonymous, harming the general public's perception of the police and police perceptions of city residents. If there were a system in place for recognizing good cops and humanizing police interactions, that might change the equation in a powerful way. In the best case scenario, such a system would prevent the formation of angry mobs altogether, by diffusing tensions long before a triggering event causes these tensions to explode into conflict in the streets.
The prospect of creating a citywide token makes this idea additionally compelling for crypto enthusiasts. If the idea does turn into a real initiative, it would represent a huge step towards the mainstream adoption we're all eagerly anticipating.
This article was originally published on Voice for Cryptowriter in association with Voice.