Finding & Reviewing Community Policing Apps in Asia

The increasingly-adopted mobile devices create new opportunities for the police to engage with citizens at anywhere and anytime. However, there has been limited academic work evaluating these technologies. This paper reports an auto-ethnographic evaluation study of Android community policing (CP) applications (Apps) used in Asia. Without guidance, our study indicates that finding appropriate Asian CP Apps is challenging. This paper reports the descriptive App store characteristics, functionalities, communication channels, and privacy of CP Apps. We conclude with design implications and call for developing the standardized App store description system and a CP App evaluation model

Improving road safety knowledge in Africa through crowdsourcing. The African Road Safety Observatory

Africa is the worst performing continent in road safety: the fatality rate, 26.6 per 100.000 inhabitants, is almost three times that of Europe's and fatalities per capita are projected to double from 2015 to 2030 (WHO, 2015). This is mainly due to the fact that Emerging Economies are experiencing increases in traffic, for which their traffic systems are not sufficiently prepared. On one hand, there is a significant demand for data and knowledge to be used for road safety-related decision making. On the other hand, there is a substantial lack of a reliable and detailed knowledge on road casualties in terms of the number of road accidents and fatalities occurring and, on the factors, leading to road accidents or affecting their consequences. When official data are poor or missing these could be integrated with other sources. The objective of this paper is to describe the African Road Safety Observatory (African RSO), a participative web portal developed in the field of the "SaferAfrica-Innovating dialogue and problems appraisal for a safer Africa" project, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program. The African RSO combines traditional functions of analyzing and sharing road safety performance data and provide knowledge and information, with the more innovative ones: a Dialogue Platform and the crowdsourcing tool. The Dialogue Platform is dedicated to experts and stakeholders and aims at encouraging and facilitating a constructive engagement and dialogue on road safety in Africa, producing knowledge to inspire road safety funding, policies and interventions in Africa and providing recommendations to update the African Road Safety Action Plan and the African Road Safety Charter. The crowdsourcing tool allows African citizens to report and highlight road safety needs, to share opinions as well as to discuss solutions in their own Countries

Designing Technologies for Community Policing

Community policing faces a combination of new challenges and opportunities due to both citizens and police adopting new digital technologies. However, there is limited scholarly work providing evidence for how technologies assist citizens’ interactions with the police. This paper reports preliminary findings from interviews with 13 participants, both citizens and police officers, in England. We recognize four key types of actors in the current practice of community policing, alongside existing technologies and challenges faced by citizens and the police. We conclude with three design implications for improving citizen-police engagement

On the successful deployment of community policing services: the TRILLION project case

The evolution of policing towards the next generation, not only involves confronting new types of crime such as cybercrime, but also the active engagement of citizens in the process of creating a secure environment through the deployment of community policing practices. However, in order to fully exploit the potential of community policing, the building of trust between citizens and Law Enforcement Officers is important. In this paper, the authors (all participating in the EU Research project on community policing TRILLION), discuss issues related to the use of innovative technologies, while ensuring societal approval, in the context of community policing. Both requirements and corresponding work leading to the actual implementation of a fully operational platform are presented