Article: Examining Technology that Supports Community Policing
Authors: Sheena Lewis and Dan A. Lewis
Leader: Ri
Summery:
Community policing is a strategy of policing that focuses on police building ties and working closely with members of the communities [2]. The paper [1] analyzes how citizen uses technology in order to support community policing by conducting a comparative study between 2 websites that were created to help citizens address crime. One of them is CLEARpath, an official website created by the Chicago police to provide information and receive tips from the citizens of Chicago. Another one is an unofficial web forum moderated by the residents of the community for having problem-solving conversations.
The motivation of the paper [1] lies in:
Designing technology to best support collective action against crime.
The paper [1] discusses 2 theory based crime prevention from 2 perspectives, i) Victimization Theory, the police perspective, and ii) Social Control Theory, the community perspective. The victimization theory focuses on understanding crime as events that occur between a potential victim, offender, and the environment, whereas, the social control theory suggests that social interactions influence criminal acts through informal enforcement of social norms. The victimization theory tries to prevent criminal behavior by educating potential victims. On the contrary, the social control theory suggests that criminal behavior can be influenced by strong application of social norms.
In the later sections of the paper, the authors examined a diverse north-side Chicago community and its online and offline discussions about crime. This particular community had a medium-level of violent crime along with a high number of property damage.
The authors found that Chicago police had smarter technology implements in CLEARpath, such as, finding crime hot spots, connecting to other law enforcement agencies, providing extensive mapping technology, etc. The website had 15 modules in total, 12 of them for providing information and 3 modules to accept its community concerns as inputs. It also had an informal community policing web forum with 221 members as of 2011. The authors also examined the community web forum, described as “community crime website” and found numerous online posts. Interestingly, the authors found only 3 community concern posts in 365 days to the police website, whereas, 10 posts in 90 days on the community web forum. This shows a significant participation difference between official police website and informal community web forum.
The research also deduct based on their findings that residents of the community use the forum to:
- Build relationships and strengthen social ties,
- Discuss ways that they can engage in collective action,
- Share information and advice, and
- Reinforce offline and online community norms.
Based on these findings, the authors suggest that there should be significant change in design in crime prevention tools. For increasing active participation, designs should focus not only on citizen-police interaction but also on citizen-citizen interaction, where relationship building can occur.
Reflection:
The paper [1], in my opinion, takes a HCI approach to address the crime theories and how these theories can be translated into design implication. The problem is important in order to share personal experiences and strengthen social ties in a community which can further address local concerns and criminal activities. The existing solution of official police website doesn’t encourage active participation. As a result, the information conveyed on the website may not get the maximum impact. The authors rather suggest that web tools to support community policing should be designed to adhere to and support communication that allow residents to engage in collective problem-solving discussions and to informally regulate social norms.
In my opinion, community policing can increase awareness among the residents of a certain community. As the paper [1] suggests, community policing can range from a member’s improper landscaping to an elderly being assaulted during home invasion. The community policing reflects the real and contemporary problems and issues faced by the community itself and their way of addressing them.
However, what I found troubling about this platform is that, the article mentions that site moderators have the power to ban members of the forum if they don’t abide by their group rules and regulations. It got me thinking, what happens after the member is been banned? Since the member is presumably still a resident of the community, he/she is a part of the community. Is the ban temporary or permanent? Is the banned member approached in person by other members of the community for resolving the situation? Or does it create more unsettling situation in the real life?
I think the author also mentioned another important topic of legitimacy of the community policing in the eyes of the police officials. The article mentions that the moderators managed the legitimacy of the website by distancing the website from the police. Also, I think, trust and accountability are 2 very important challenges regarding community policing.
For further study, I suggest a later paper [3], named “Building group capacity for problem solving and police–community partnerships through survey feedback and training: a randomized control trial within Chicago’s community policing program”, published in 2014, which also analyzes Chicago’s community policing program and comes with a solution regarding police–community partnerships through survey feedback and training.
Questions:
- Could you propose some designs that may increase the participation of community members in the official law-enforcement website?
- Does the banning of members, who violate group rules, make the community a better place? Or does it only separate the members from the virtual world as they keep their presence in the community intact?
- Do you think it is possible to establish legitimacy of community policing in the eyes of police officials? Can the trust on police official be increased? And can the online platform introduce accountability to the community policing?
- What do you think can be done for the people who are not part of the online community? Does community policing explicitly need all the members of the community to actively participate in the online web forum?
References:
[1] Lewis, S., & Lewis, D. A. (2012). Examining technology that supports community policing. In Conference Proceedings – The 30th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2012 (pp. 1371-1380). DOI: 10.1145/2207676.2208595
[2] Community policing, as defined in Wikipedia.
[3] Graziano, L.M., Rosenbaum, D.P. & Schuck, A.M. J Exp Criminol (2014) 10: 79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-012-9171-y
