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 Stimulating the Human Flesh Search Engines; A New Progressive Agenda for Community Safety

by Timothy Watts | 14-Dec-2009 | Comments (1) Tags: CBD Violence, Community Safety, Crime Prevention, Web 2.0, Community Policing  12 ratings. Please log in to rate and comment

The most basic obligation of government is to ensure an adequate level of community safety. However despite its importance to the electorate, in recent times Australian progressives have allowed the public debate on community safety to be dominated by a conservative agenda of retribution and deterrence through ever increasing judicial punishment. As public concern over community safety grows as a result of the increase in alcohol fuelled violence in Australia’s cities, progressive policy makers should reclaim the agenda and engage this important issue on their own terms.

Progressives policy makers should champion a new community safety agenda built on one of the great, untold success stories of progressive policy making; community policing. Using the well established progressive principles of community policing, policy makers should take advantage of innovative communications tools to build a series of online crime prevention communities. These online communities would facilitate information sharing and collaboration on crime prevention practices between the police, residents and community groups who are best positioned to know what works on the ground; a form of 21^st century Neighbourhood Watch. This ‘Community Policing 2.0’ initiative would give citizens a direct stake in crime prevention in their communities and take back the community safety agenda for progressives.

Despite the media’s simplistic “Crime and Punishment” approach to criminology, in practice, the recent gains in crime prevention in Australia have been achieved through community policing rather than judicial deterrence. Originally developed in the late 1970s, community policing originally comprised a broad set of progressive reforms to police practice designed to both increase community involvement in crime prevention efforts and the accountability of the police to the communities that they served. Community policing recognised that crime was not primarily an outcome of rational actors weighing incentives, but was influenced by a complex set of interacting individual, sociological and environmental factors. The community policing model recognised that a large number of stakeholders needed to be engaging in crime prevention efforts including police, residents, businesses, community organisations, ethnic groups, youth groups, mental health organisations, criminologists and architects.

While community policing has been highly successful, the challenge with the model has always been how to efficiently aggregate and distribute the contributions of numerous and diverse stakeholders. It is in this area that the recent emergence of innovative online communications tools offers progressive policy makers the opportunity to establish a new, electorally appealing agenda for increasing community safety.

Over the past half a decade, new communications tools have revolutionised the way that humans are able to interact. Online tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites have dramatically lowered the transaction costs of finding and maintaining contact with likeminded individuals. This has resulted in the formation of informal online communities of interest within every esoteric niche of human interest. These communities have proven themselves highly adept at not only aggregating and disseminating the tacit knowledge of the individuals of which they comprise, but also at increasing the value of this information by collaboratively evaluating and filtering it. They are ideally suited to the challenges facing community policing.

In light of this, progressive policy makers should be working to encourage the emergence of online communities of stakeholders engaged in crime prevention.  Governments can do this by acting as a platform for collaboration; by making the government data, resources and public servants relevant to crime prevention available to community members to use and interact with online. A potential starting point of such a platform would be the release of up-to-date, geo-tagged, open standard public crime data at the street level or below.

Publicly associating open standard crime data with locations would have a number of flow-on effects.

Firstly, it would provide a forum for those individuals and organisations directly affected by crimes in a particular location to share information. If a public crime map showed that three assaults have occurred in a particular laneway within a weekend, the map would provide a platform for a nearby nightclub owner to inform the crime prevention community that the streetlights in the laneway were not working.

Secondly, a crime map of this kind would provide public accountability. It can’t be good for business if there have been a dozen assaults within a block of your establishment within the last month – especially if a bar around the corner has publicly implemented a new security practice recommended by a Licensees’ Forum that has dramatically reduced assaults.

Thirdly, the provision of the data in open standards would give community members the freedom to repurpose public crime data in innovative ways to offer new insights or uses. A wiki might be established to allow licensees to share their knowledge and experiences to collaborate on best practice approaches to security issues. A community may emerge to crowd source crime-stopping by using Twitter to disseminate police reports of unsolved crimes and seek out information from the community.  The community may establish its own form of Bentham’s panopticon, using collectively monitored CCTV Webcams to create a networked Neighbourhood Watch.

The potential of user driven innovation within online crime prevention communities is limited only by the extent that policy makers are willing to engage with them.

Finally, community led crime prevention initiatives of this kind are also likely to attract significant public support. We know this because online communities of interest have already begun to form on an ad hoc basis. The media has already reported a number of incidences of people using social networking sites in order to collect information on crimes on their own initiative. In China, the phenomenon of spontaneous, community led online criminal investigations has become so widespread that the practice now has a name “ren'rou sou'suo”, which translates literally as the evocative “Human Flesh Search Engine”.

Online crime prevention communities would be practical, progressive and popular. While they may need rebranding in the Australian market, progressives seeking to reclaim the public safety agenda should be asking themselves what they can do to unleash “human flesh search engines” in our nation.

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