Understanding Digital Crime Prevention: Investigating How Communities Use Technology to Address Crime

Understaning Digital Crime Prevention: Investigating How Communities Use Technology to Address Crime ​

For the past three decades, scholars have studied neighborhoods’ collective responses to crime. While there is broad agreement amongst scholars that crime can be prevented by collective action, few researchers have explored how to design technologies that influence collective action against crime. Such research is particularly important in low income, high crime neighborhoods. This lead us to the research question: How do we design technologies that support the building of social and political capital in low income communities and build a technological solution to enable local residents to collectively address crime by building relationships with each other, identifying problems, brainstorming solutions, and connecting to organizations and government institutions that can help. Partnering with the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Community), we conducted an ethnographic study with local residents to understand their values, motivations, and desires as it relates to crime prevention in their neighborhood. We then designed, built, and evaluated a technological solution that increases social capital and digital connectedness amongst local residents in Woodlawn. Results from the study helped us extend crime prevention theories such that they better reflect the role that technology plays in today’s society. Furthermore, by exploring online communications about crime in racially diverse communities that have be selected on the basis of high and low crime rates, scholars can begin to understand the relationship between online and in-person communication.

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