Reconnecting Communities & the Police: A Brief Reflection on Civic Collaboration Tools in Community Policing

Posted on by Michael Harding

police in the street © creative commons

Reconnecting Communities & the Police: A Brief Reflection on Civic Collaboration Tools in Community Policing

Have you ever experienced antisocial behaviour (ASB) in your community? As a victim or witness, did you choose to report it to anyone? Recent research has shown that 56% of people in the UK who were a victim of, or a witness to ASB chose not to report it [1]. Of those that did raise awareness of ASB, the majority of those who did report incidents of ASB to local agencies (e.g. Councils, Police) were dissatisfied with the response they received. As someone who has lived, studied and worked in the North-West and surrounding Lancaster and Morecambe Bay region for over 15 years, I've encountered numerous situations in which my own or another’s personal safety was potentially at risk. However, like the majority, I tended to fall short in reporting such issues. While the reasons for ASB underreporting are complex [2][3] (e.g. perceived seriousness of ASB, fear of recrimination & retribution, mistrust in public administration), here we begin to build on our previous work into citizen interactions with public agencies [4] and take a look at emerging issues associated with the adoption and use of civic digital platforms. In particular, we consider civic digital services currently available in the UK and US that attempt to empower citizens to report on antisocial behaviour and strengthen partnerships with local agencies to improve public safety.

The facilitation of citizen engagement in public administration and the strengthening of community relationships with local institutions through technology is a deeply explored sociotechnical problem [6][7]. In particular, the political ideologies of the 'Big Society' (i.e. social solidarity and voluntarism) [8] in 2010 combined with the proliferation of everyday mobile computing and open data movements [9] have galvanised both public and private sector bodies to develop a litany of mobile applications and online portals that attempt to create more open, transparent governance and afford the public new opportunities to become more activist in various aspects of civic life. Whether that's by allowing members of the public to raise awareness of infrastructural (e.g. potholes, see FixMyStreet) [5] and behavioural (e.g. noise disturbances or hate crime) issues or through attempts to better protect more vulnerable members of our communities. However, it appears very few projects have successfully managed to synergise public and local institution work in any sustainable manner, particularly those digital services designed to encourage communities to report and work together on antisocial concerns.

Future thinking into the design of collaborative, civic technologies has been afforded greater importance in recent months with the UK Government's 'Beating crime plan' [10] that aims to 'introduce bold new measures to drive down crime' by 'reconnecting the police with the public' primarily 'through a national online platform, allowing them [the public] to access a range of interactive police services in one coordinated place'.

While the plan to design a new national online platform is void of any specific detail, there is an apparent willingness to deliver more e-governance services. Given the renewed political appetite for technological solutions to form better interactions between communities and the police, as part of the Future Places Centre (FPC) we have begun to examine i) existing digital community-driven services to better understand the technical barriers that constrain user uptake, and ii) ways in which pervasive technologies embedded in local communities are providing law enforcement institutions with new mechanisms to collaborate with the public, such as Amazon's Ring Neighbourhood and Citizen applications, but also appear to be stoking public vigilantism, eroding privacy and amplify ethnic division in communities.

In the UK, of the many reasons that citizens choose not to report non-emergency crimes, the desire to maintain their anonymity appears to be particularly important. Yet, the majority of ASB reporting services offered through local authority and police portals typically require residents to first provide personal identity and/or contact information before issues can be raised. Rapport (branded as stayintheknow by Lancashire County Council) [11][12], a neighbourhood community messaging mobile service, enables police forces, local authorities and the public to disseminate information.

(Morecambe Police, Facebook post in local community group)

Sold to local authorities as a community engagement tool to augment commonplace information sharing that often organically materialise on social media platforms, typically through local Facebook groups. Participants must register to gain access and report. Similarly, ASB reporting services such as the Noise app [13], which enables residents to monitor and report noise disturbances, require pre-registration before issues can be reported to relevant organisations. With digital civic engagement services looking to establish deeper relations between citizens and authorities that serve local communities, there appear to be several prominent design challenges (e.g. service discoverability, ‘evidence’ collection methods, service control & governance) that continue to stymie wider acceptance and sustained use. The discoverability of civic services refers to the degree to which the public can easily find relevant tools at the point of need. The geographically siloed, defragmented landscape of civic reporting services across different, often overlapping law enforcement and managing civic authorities (e.g. Rapport) along with the range of native and non-native mobile/web platforms supported, overcomplicate what should be a seamless, low-effort experience.

ASB reporting services often require users to complete 'diary sheets' and actively build up 'evidence' over an extended period (i.e. weeks, months) before case reports are likely to be investigated. As Wigan Council's ASB online reporting portal states 'we are very limited in how we can investigate complaints if we do not receive diary sheets' [14]. While limited resources and underlying regulations require sufficient levels of reliable evidence to advance any investigation, it nevertheless projects enforcement work onto citizens (see Wigan Council’s diary sheet for citizen evidence-gathering).

(Image copyright NBC News)

For community members that may harbour traditionally held feelings of suspicion or mistrust towards civic agencies, engagement tools that lack oversight, transparency and are controlled centrally by such public bodies may compound negative sentiment and discourage use. Deciding on who controls digital civic services and how ASB reporting tools are governed appears to be an important factor in encouraging sustained uptake. For example, a highly successful online service in the UK that aims to improve the safety of sex workers by encouraging the reporting of violent incidents has been developed and supported by the charity 'National Ugly Mugs' seeded by funding from the UK Government. Critically, information is shared amongst sex worker communities, data is not held on law enforcement managed databases and enables more decentralised forms of collaborative, neighbourhood policing where vulnerable groups feel more empowered to help protect one another. However, the successes and growing use of community policing services managed by non-government and law enforcement agencies appear to not always lead to shaping ways of community living that promote safety and wellbeing.

A new wave of mobile-first civic engagement services such as Citizen (formally Vigilante), Nextdoor and SketchFactor have in some cases encouraged the public to side-step dependencies on law enforcement altogether. Worryingly, such services, designed primarily towards digital natives (i.e. millennials, Gen Z), aim to encourage the public to take matters of community safety into their own hands, which has resulted in acts of mob justice, vigilantism, racial profiling and placing unwitting individuals in harm’s way. Citizen has looked to monetarily incentivise members of the community to report on developing ASB incidents and active crimes by live streaming events happening in their neighbourhood. This has led to many cases where communities have been mobilised to ‘work together’ in tracking down suspected criminals in real-time. However, with significant levels of misinformation and hearsay communicated through such platforms, several individuals have been victim to false accusations of wrongdoing, leading to further division and fear in communities.

Amazon’s ‘Ring Neighbourhood App’ provides a glimpse into one potential future of digital civic engagement and community-driven policing that exploits the Internet-of-Things (IoT), specifically, real-time video cameras mounted on resident doorbells that can record the goings-on of street life beyond (and within depending on the devices deployed) a resident’s home. The Ring mobile app is essentially a social network that allows homeowners to share and even categorise (e.g. as a possible occurrence of a crime) video clips and images that other neighbours can comment on. Similar, to Citizen, this has led to several reports of racial profiling and information misuse. Unbeknown to most Ring doorbell owners, Amazon provides law enforcement open access to the network, with over 2,000 police agencies in the US reported to be actively using the platform, essentially as a surveillance and evidence gathering tool.

Given the technical and social challenges civic engagement technologies aim to address (i.e. community safety, accountability, institutional mistrust, ethic division) and in some cases promote (vigilantism, racial profiling, data misuse & privacy concerns), how can we design future civic technologies to be more equitable and human-centred for members of the public, law enforcement and other relevant agencies (i.e. local authorities, charities) that serve the community? This question feels particularly pertinent as the UK Government begins to implement new crime beating policies that aim to leverage digital tools to ‘reconnect’ such stakeholders over community policing matters. As part of the Future Places Centre, we have begun to engage with local stakeholders in the Morecambe Bay region led by Morecambe BID to explore the future of community policing and the possibilities emerging technologies (AI, IoT, distributed ledgers) may afford in measuring perceptions of safety and designing safer ways of living in local communities.

References

[1] Resolve 2021, Taking back our communities - working together to make communities safer, Resolve Centre of Excellence for community safety and antisocial behaviour, viewed 28 August 2021. https://www.resolveuk.org.uk/asb-awareness-week/resources-and-media-pack/115-taking-back-our-communities/viewdocument/115

[2] Roger Tarling, Katie Morris, Reporting Crime to the Police, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 50, Issue 3, May 2010, Pages 474–490, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azq011

[3] Connelly, L., Kamerāde, D. and Sanders, T. (2021) ‘Violent and Nonviolent Crimes Against Sex Workers: The Influence of the Sex Market on Reporting Practices in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36(7–8), pp. NP3938–NP3963. doi: 10.1177/0886260518780782.

[4] Mike Harding, Bran Knowles, Nigel Davies, and Mark Rouncefield. 2015. HCI, Civic Engagement & Trust. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2833–2842. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702255

[5] FixMyStreet. 2021. FixMyStreet Online Portal, viewed 12 September 2021, <https://www.fixmystreet.com/>.

[6] Min Zhang, Arosha K. Bandara, Blaine Price, Graham Pike, Zoe Walkington, Camilla Elphick, Lara Frumkin, Richard Philpot, Mark Levine, Avelie Stuart, and Bashar Nuseibeh. 2020. Designing Technologies for Community Policing. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383021

[7] Kevin C. Desouza & Akshay Bhagwatwar (2014) Technology-Enabled Participatory Platforms for Civic Engagement: The Case of U.S. Cities, Journal of Urban Technology, 21:4, 25-50, DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2014.954898

[8] KISBY, B. (2010), The Big Society: Power to the People?. The Political Quarterly, 81: 484-491. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-923X.2010.02133.x

[9] Baack, S. (2015) ‘Datafication and empowerment: How the open data movement re-articulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism’, Big Data & Society. doi: 10.1177/2053951715594634.

[10] UK Government 2021, Beating crime plan, Policy Paper, viewed 12 August 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/beating-crime-plan/beating-crime-plan

[11] Rapport App 2021, Rapport Neighbourhood Alerts, viewed 14 August 2021. https://www.neighbourhoodalert.co.uk/Rapport

[12] Lancashire County Council, Stayintheknow web portal, viewed 14 August 2021. https://www.stayintheknow.co.uk

[13] RH Environmental Ltd, The Noise App, viewed 14 August 2021 https://www.thenoiseapp.com

[14] Wigan Council. How to report antisocial behaviour, viewed 14 August 2021. https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Resident/Crime-Emergencies/ASB/How-to-report-anti-social-behaviour.aspx

Related Blogs

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.

Back to blog listing