City.Risks: Citizens’ participation in fighting crime
Why City.Risks?
The constant growth of urban environments confronts inhabitants, city officials and authorities with many issues concerning city safety and security. These issues influence people’s perception of security in cities and consequently have an impact on the economic development and the quality of life. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new solutions and technologies that go beyond the idea that only law enforcement and the criminal justice system are to fight crime. With today’s technology it is possible to integrate citizens into the process of tackling security risks and finding solutions to prevent these. This cooperation between authorities and citizens is what the EU-funded project City.Risks wants to achieve.
Interaction between Citizens and Authorities
The objectives of City.Risks are to gain better understanding of crimes in cities and the possible prevention. One of the goals is to provide a more in-depth analysis and understanding of what constitutes fear in an urban environment. In terms of fear, both dimensions of fear, the objective dimension related to the actual surroundings and crime incidents and the subjective dimension related to societal and psychological factors are analysed.
Moreover, this project aims at fostering the engagement of citizens and encouraging them to interact with authorities and each other in trusted networks. To do so it is instrumental to provide people with a platform and technologies to collect, integrate, manage and visualize crime-related information. This information can then be used for the prevention of crime. City.Risks will focus on crimes such as the theft of personal belongings including vehicle theft, but also on information gathering and dissemination for ongoing events, citizen engagement and safety for tourists, women and in neighborhoods. Designing and developing mobile services are the key to turning citizens’ smart phones into the primary tool for sharing safety-critical information with appropriate authorities.
After designing and developing solutions and technologies, it is instrumental to validate and evaluate these in real-life scenarios and settings. To do so, pilot trials will be set up and operated in various cities. The final objective of the project is to produce flexible and sustainable business models, best practices and replication plans for further deployment of the results gained from this project.
The Technical Approach
As already mentioned, the main approach of City.Risks is to place information sharing at the center of addressing security challenges in large urban areas. In order to achieve this goal, several technical aspects have to be taken into consideration. First of all, many different sources of information have to be analysed, integrated, exploited. These sources include, for example, historical crime data and statistics, victimization reports and demographic data.
The target groups of this project are the citizens of these urban environments. Citizens are actively engaged as both targets and sources of information. They participate in a bidirectional communication channel between citizens and authorities or among themselves using trusted networks. The final goal is to use the available information to prevent security threats and mitigate the impact of crimes when they actually occur by utilizing citizens’ smart phones and mobile devices.