Fresh Ideas Series
When Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes, the great detective didn’t work alone. He had the Baker Street Irregulars — a ragtag group of street kids who scoured the city for information Holmes couldn’t get himself. Long before the term existed, Holmes was practicing what we now call crowdsourcing: harnessing the power of many to solve problems that one person, or even one institution, couldn’t crack alone. Today, the same principle is transforming the way we solve crimes, close cold cases, and demand accountability.

What Is Crowdsourcing?

At its core, crowdsourcing is the practice of gathering information or solving problems by tapping into the collective intelligence of a group. The term was coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson,3 but the practice itself is ancient — from museums built through donated collections to communities rallying around missing persons cases.

When done right, crowdsourcing follows a clear process:

The Four Steps of Effective Crowdsourcing
1 A call to action — sometimes with incentives. The public needs to know what is needed, how to help, and what participation looks like.
2 Collecting data — submissions, tips, observations, analysis, and records gathered from participants across different backgrounds and skill sets.
3 Managing and sorting findings — organizing the raw incoming information into usable form, filtering signal from noise.
4 Verifying accuracy — cross-checking, corroborating, and validating findings before acting on them. This step is where responsible crowdsourcing separates itself from speculation.

It’s not just cheap or efficient, it’s powerful. Because when many people focus their time, skills, and networks on a single issue, they uncover leads and truths that otherwise stay buried.

Where It’s Already Working

Crowdsourcing has revolutionized science, history, and media. If it can change those fields, why not criminal justice?

History Preserved
When a fire destroyed U.S. War Department archives in 1800, the records seemed lost forever. By 2006, volunteers had digitized over 45,000 recovered documents.7 The Library of Congress now relies on volunteers to transcribe letters from Abraham Lincoln and suffragist leaders.8
Science Expanded
Citizen scientists have helped identify earthquakes more accurately than AI,9 discovered new planets,11 and spotted gravitational lenses that professional astronomers overlooked.10 NOAA depends on citizen science for ongoing environmental monitoring.12
Media Democratized
News outlets now regularly depend on eyewitness video from citizens. Social media has turned bystanders into the first responders of accountability — on the ground faster than any newsroom, at scale no single outlet could match.

Crowdsourcing in Criminal Justice

Law enforcement has long depended on the public. The very roots of policing in England relied on crowds — able-bodied men forming posses to track criminals. Juries are essentially crowdsourcing panels tasked with solving the hardest questions of guilt and innocence.13

But in the digital age, things are evolving fast.

TV & Public Alerts
America’s Most Wanted led to the capture of 1,200 fugitives.15 AMBER Alerts have rescued nearly 1,000 children since 2006.18 Citizen power at broadcast scale.
Community Programs
Crimestoppers pays anonymous tipsters, proving that when people feel safe, they talk.17 Anonymity removes the social cost of reporting and dramatically increases the flow of usable information.
Social Media Sleuths
After the 2011 Vancouver riots, Facebook photos and videos led to prosecutions that traditional policing might have missed.4 Bystanders documented what investigators could not have staged.

Closing Cold Cases with Collective Power

Some of the most remarkable breakthroughs come from ordinary people refusing to let cases go cold. Done responsibly, citizen detectives follow unwritten rules: verify before publishing, respect victims, avoid naming suspects prematurely, and collaborate when possible.

“Grateful Doe” Identified

Reddit users helped connect a decades-old John Doe case to Jason Callahan’s grieving mother — a resolution that came not from law enforcement, but from strangers online who refused to let the case disappear.22

The Luka Magnotta Case

A global community on Facebook pieced together evidence against a murderer who posted his crimes online. The community did what formal systems couldn’t: connected the dots in real time across jurisdictions.23

The Murder Squad Podcast

True crime listeners don’t just consume stories — they upload DNA to genealogy databases and help solve cases. One listener helped crack a 40-year-old murder in Colorado.24

The Boston Bombing Cautionary Note

Online forums misidentified a suspect — a failure of guidance and safeguards, not of crowdsourcing itself. The lesson is clear: structure and oversight matter. The tool is not the problem.26

Why Law Enforcement Resists — and Why They Shouldn’t

Some police dismiss crowdsourcing as chaotic or even dangerous. Yes, mistakes can happen, as seen when online forums misidentified a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. But that wasn’t a failure of crowdsourcing itself — it was a failure of guidance and safeguards.

What Structured Crowdsourcing Could Look Like

Imagine instead a model that captures the power while managing the risk:

  • Police-run volunteer networks with training, background checks, and oversight — so citizen effort is channeled rather than chaotic.
  • Citizen experts bringing fresh eyes to cases, using skills police may lack, like genetic genealogy or data analysis.
  • Technology partnerships between departments and communities, ensuring information flows safely and effectively.

As clearance rates plummet and budgets shrink,20,21 refusing crowdsourcing is not just outdated. It’s negligent.

The Clearance Rate Problem

Cold case investigations are expensive, time-intensive, and increasingly underfunded.19 At the same time, law enforcement agencies are declining to use one of the most cost-effective tools available to them: the public. When budgets are cited as the reason cases go unsolved, refusing free, motivated, skilled volunteer labor from the community is not a resource constraint. It is a choice.

Conclusion: The New Irregulars

Every day, across the world, people are already working together to solve crimes. They are the New Irregulars — ordinary citizens with laptops, podcasts, Reddit threads, or just determination to seek justice.

If Sherlock Holmes were alive today, he wouldn’t be walking the streets of London with a magnifying glass. He’d be logging into Reddit, scrolling through Facebook videos, and opening his inbox to find case notes from volunteers.

“The question is not if crowdsourcing belongs in criminal justice. It’s when law enforcement will finally embrace it. Because in the fight for justice, the crowd isn’t a threat — it’s the future.”
Related Coverage — Clutch Justice
Why Do Judges and Prosecutors Get Away With Unethical Behavior?
I Experienced Michigan State Police Misconduct. This Is My Story.
Michigan Judicial Misconduct Database — Clutch Justice
The Case for Three Strikes Law Reform: Rethinking Mandatory Sentencing
Court System Subcomponents Around the World: How Justice Systems Compare and Contrast
References
  1. Merritt, R. Characters by Arthur Conan Doyle: The Baker Street Irregulars and Billy the Page. arthurconandoyle.co.uk →
  2. Parrick, R., & Chapman, B. (2020). Working the crowd for forensic research: A review of contributor motivation and recruitment strategies used in crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for scientific research. Forensic Science International: Synergy, 2, 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2020.05.002
  3. Nassar, L., & Karray, F. (2019). Overview of the crowdsourcing process. Knowledge & Information Systems, 60(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1235-5
  4. Gray, G., & Benning, B. (2019). Crowdsourcing criminology: Social media and citizen policing in missing person cases. SAGE Open, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019893700
  5. Nassar, L., & Karray, F. (2019). Overview of the crowdsourcing process. Knowledge & Information Systems, 60(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1235-5
  6. Williams, C. (2013). Crowdsourcing Research: A methodology for investigating state crime. State Crime Journal, 2(1), 30.
  7. Heppler, J. A., & Wolfenstein, G. K. (n.d.). Crowdsourcing digital public history. Organization of American Historians. tah.oah.org →
  8. Krasnoff, B. (2019, August 14). Write history for the Library of Congress’ crowdsourcing project. The Verge. theverge.com →
  9. Tang, V., Rösler, B., Nelson, J., Thompson, J., Lee, S. V. D., Chao, K., & Paulsen, M. (2020). Citizen scientists help detect and classify dynamically triggered seismic activity in Alaska. Frontiers in Earth Science, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.00321
  10. Hadhazy, A. (2016, January 15). Crowdsourcing the universe: How citizen scientists are driving discovery. Space.com. space.com →
  11. Reddy, F. (2020, January 6). TESS discovers its 1st planet orbiting 2 stars. NASA. nasa.gov →
  12. Citizen science and crowdsourcing. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. noaa.gov →
  13. Schmalleger, F. (2019). Criminal justice today: An introductory text for the twenty-first century (15th ed.). Pearson.
  14. Jensen, B. (2019). Chase darkness with me: How one true-crime writer started solving murders. Sourcebooks, Inc.
  15. Cochran, A. (2013, May 7). “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh on cancellation: Show needs to be on TV. CBS News. cbsnews.com →
  16. McCrary, R., & Kent, A. M. (2020, October 15). Shiawassee sheriff teams up with ‘To Catch a Predator’ host in child sex sting. WNEM Saginaw. wnem.com →
  17. Marlow, A., & Miller, R. (2000). The value of crimestoppers. Police Journal, 73(2).
  18. Office of Justice Programs. (2020). Statistics — AMBER Alert. amberalert.ojp.gov →
  19. Davis, R. C., Jensen, C. J., III, Burgette, L., & Burnett, K. (2014). Working smarter on cold cases: Identifying factors associated with successful cold case investigations. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 59(2), 375–382. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12384
  20. Gascon, G., & Foglesong, T. (2010, December). Making policing more affordable: Managing costs and measuring value in policing. ncjrs.gov →
  21. LaPorte, G., Waltke, H., Heurich, C., & Chase, R. J. (2018, April). National Institute of Justice fiscal year 2017 funding for DNA analysis, capacity enhancement, and other forensic activities. ncjrs.gov →
  22. Rogers, M. (2015, December 11). “Grateful Doe” is identified 20 years after road trip death. New York Times. nytimes.com →
  23. Kelly, M. (Writer), & Karp, M. (Director). (2014, November 30). Hunting Luka Magnotta [TV series episode]. In J. Williamson (Executive Producer), The Fifth Estate. Canadian Broadcasting Company.
  24. Ehrlich, B., & Marks, A. (2020, January 14). True crime podcast leads to arrest in 40-year-old cold case. Rolling Stone. rollingstone.com →
  25. Glaser, R. (2017, November 2). Crime fighting crowd: Can crowdsourcing help solve real-life crimes? WWMT. wwmt.com →
  26. Füller, J., Hutter, K., & Kröger, N. (2020). How to prevent crowdsourcing disasters and leverage positive side effects of open innovation. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 12(1), 30–35. https://doi.org/10.2478/nimmir-2020-0005
How to cite: Williams, R. (2023, March 9). Crowdsourcing Justice: How “The New Irregulars” Are Exposing Systemic Corruption. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2023/03/09/crowdsourcing-justice/

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Last Update: March 20, 2026

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