2.14 Citizen Forensics

Academic team: Prof Arosha Bandara, Prof Bashar Nuseibeh, Prof Graham Pike, Prof Blaine Price, Prof Mark Levine
Policing partners: Gwent Police, Thames Valley Police, Merseyside Police
Other partners: Milton Keynes Council, Exeter City Council
Status: Complete

London March

This project reframes key challenges that underlie modern policing in a socio-technical world; a world instrumented with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies, in which many citizens and communities live, work and play, but which must also manage threats to their wellbeing and their rights. The project aims to support a new engagement between authorities (such as the police) and communities of citizens in order to better investigate (and in the long term reduce) potential or actual threats to citizen security, safety, and privacy.

This includes both empowering the police by opening up new ways of citizens providing data in ways that protect privacy and anonymity, and empowering citizens by using these new technologies to also hold the police to account. We will be harnessing many of the so-called Internet of Things, Smart City and Smart Home technologies to encourage and allow citizens to help the police collect and analyse disparate data to improve public safety at both local and ultimately national levels.

This multidisciplinary investigation draws upon expertise in computing, policing, psychology and organisational theory.

https://www.citizenforensics.org/

Outputs

Title	Outputs type	Lead academic	Year
Attitudes towards Online Community Support Initiatives during COVID-19 pandemic: A survey in the UK	Report	Zhang, M.	2022
Gratitude tree	Website	Team	2021
Digital detectives: Websleuthing reduces eyewitness idntification accuracy in police lineups	Article	Elphick, C.	2021
Designing technologies for community policing	Workshop	Zhang, M	2020
Towards Citizen Forensics: Improving citizen-police collaboration	Workshop	Bandara, A	2020
Building trust in digital policing: A scoping review of community policing apps	Journal	Elphick, C.	2020
Altruism and anxiety: Engagement with online community support initiatives (OCSIs) during Covid-19 lockdown in the UK and Ireland	Journal	Elphick, C.	2020