Community-Oriented Policing and Technological Innovations

Community policing started in the United States in the second half of the century when the rise of social disorder and crime rates was so high that LEAs had to rethink about the efficiency of their relationship with citizens and about the crimefighting model in place (Crime Stoppers International 2017). The need for a new police model involved also in Europe. Recognizing that police can rarely solve public safety problems on their own, community policing encourages interactive partnerships with relevant stakeholders. Its philosophy influences the way that departments are organized and managed (personnel and technologies), encouraging the application of modern management practices for efficiency and effectiveness. These changes can be enabled by Serious games as a form of learning. Serious games generally aim to teach or train by realistically simulating some aspect of a real-world situation and allowing learners to explore in a manner that is highly interactive. In community policing, they can be used to assist training of LEAs and citizens in the uptake of technologies, such as mobile and web applications, and raise citizen awareness about the opportunities offered in community policing mechanisms and fostering citizen engagement. Community policing comprises three key components: Community Partnerships (collaborative partnerships between law enforcement agencies and citizens to address solutions to concrete, and sometimes urgent, urban security problems and increase trust in police); Organizational Transformation (the alignment of organizational management, structures, personnel, and information systems to support community partnerships); Problem Solving (the proactive and systematic examination and evaluation of the identified problems for addressing effective responses) (COPS – U.S. Department of Justice 2014). Serious games can therefore serve all three by supporting training of police academies, local police, municipalities and citizens. This paper presents their use in the context of the scenarios defined for the TRILLION (Patrikakis et al. 2017) (TRusted, CItizen – LEA coILaboratIon over sOcial Networks) project in five European cities (Lisbon, York, Ancona, Lecce and Eindhoven), which differ in terms of demographics, geography, culture and primary security threats. The training for citizens and for LEAs is outlined, highlighting their differences and the approach taken to provide practical games supporting the introduction of a community policing platform to citizens and officers.