Territorial safety networks

Abstract

It has been shown that crime and fear of crime are related to a loss of social control in large cities. Furthermore, the by-stander effect might prevent help for people in need in the case of an emergency. In this paper we suggest the Community Watch Service. It is a conceptional IT-framework to enable citizens create and/or join virtual, territorial communities. We define virtual, territorial communities as virtual communities which are linked to certain territorial aspects, e.g. a community for a certain city district, a specific street, a small town, a administrative border or any other territorial district. The Community Watch Service enriches each territory with certain software services offering functionality like reporting damage to public property, receiving information from public authorities or organizing help in the neighborhood. The Community Watch Service framework aims to improve social control in a positive way and to increase public safety in large cities. The framework is demonstrated with a prototype. It is available for standard web browsers and Android-based mobile phones. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.