2.09 Building sustainable policing practitioner communities online

Community policing is essential for dealing with community issues, yet it entails challenges such as time and effort to develop and maintain personal relationships with citizens. An online policing community can provide constant information about community issues and work as a live and synchronous portal of interaction between the public and practitioners.

It could generate practitioner-based research questions and begin to produce data through 'citizen inquiry' methodology (the use of scientific method by the public to raise and resolve problems). The project utilised the ground breaking 'nQuire-it' platform (see www.nquire-it.org), and aimed:

• to identify the sorts of inquiries that are of most interest and benefit to the police and the public and create respective "missions" on the nQuire-it platform
• to share these inquiries widely for the community to participate
• to invite both practitioners and members of the public to initiate their own "missions" giving them the opportunity to report on issues they would like to investigate, and to provide ongoing support to the community evolved around the nQuire-it platform by facilitating active participation and engagement.

Outputs