Exploring the Contribution and Relationship to Policing and Community Safety of Volunteer Street Patrols

Abstract

The pluralized policing landscape now widely involves volunteers and the voluntary sector. Volunteer street patrols (VSPs) are individuals who walk the streets of cities and towns at night. Their actions include helping those in need through acts of care, compassion, and prevention. Numerous implications exist for the volunteers who participate in this form of voluntary action, including the level to which volunteers contribute and intervene, the functions they perform within contemporary policing, and the challenges of developing and maintaining relationships with the police and other emergency services. This article argues that VSPs offer a unique and welcomed source of support to the police, providing functions the police are unable to perform. The relationship provides validity, accountability, and opportunity for the volunteers. Over reliance, increased responsibilization and challenges for volunteers delivering policing services highlight tensions in the relationship, which in turn create opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships.

Do-it-yourself surveillance: The practices and effects of WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention groups

“…Trust in the police, the authors’ institutional level of analysis, does not appear to have had any impact on whether or not people join a WNCP group. Overall, and consistent with publications on offline volunteer street patrols and watch schemes (Butcher, 2019; Westall, 2019), participants are not necessarily crime-busting cowboys. Rather, they represent a kind of ‘civic activism’ (Leach, 2003), a democratic expression of civil society.…”

“…This paper, however, pays attention to the persistence of non-paid citizen involvement in matters of local safety and security, a development which started to attract intellectual attention from the 1970s and 1980s onwards (e.g., Pennell et al, 1989; Rosenbaum, 1987; Yin et al, 1977). It is only recently that such attention has culminated in a real wave of empirical studies on the role of citizen patrols, neighbourhood watches and other forms of active citizenship in both Dutch and British community safety (Bullock, 2014; Butcher, 2019; Lub, 2018a; Schreurs, 2019; van der Land, 2014; van Steden, 2018; van Steden et al, 2011; Westall, 2019). Indeed, compared to the long-standing academic attention paid to private security officers, voluntary citizen participation in policing and crime control is an understudied social phenomenon.…”

Algorithm for community security risk assessment and influencing factors analysis by back propagation neural network

“…Renowned for its prowess in pattern recognition, prediction, and classification, BPNN stands as a formidable machine learning (ML) algorithm. Its adaptive learning capability, adeptness in nonlinear mapping, and robustness render BPNN exceptional in tackling intricate relationships and nonlinear quandaries [ [5] , [6] , [7] ]. The reason for choosing BPNN over other ML models to optimize the security risk assessment model lies primarily in several prominent advantages of BPNN.…”