Neighbourhood Watch in a Digital Age

Abstract

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

“…Lub (2018a), a mixed-method study (questionnaires filled out by officials responsible for public safety in 340 Dutch municipalities and ethnographic research of four cases in Rotterdam and Tilburg) on the contribution of (digital) neighbourhood watches to public safety in Rotterdam and Tilburg.…”

“…Vollaard (2016) reported a decrease in burglaries after the extensive introduction of WNCP groups in Tilburg, but this measure coincided with a number of other actions such as the installation of CCTV cameras, more financial and personal resources being made available for police investigation and municipal subsidies to stimulate the purchase of robust locking devices. The scope of public investment in community crime prevention is thus more substantial than WNCP groups alone (Lub, 2018a). Again, it remains disputable that digital watch schemes have a unidirectional effect on the level of burglaries and other offences in a neighbourhood.…”

“…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.…”

Goon Squad Democracy? The Rise of Vigilant Citizenship through Victim Support and Neighborhood Watches in Amsterdam (1980-1990)

“…In the twenty-first century, neighborhood prevention would grow tremendously due to the development of social media, and from 2010 onward, WhatsApp. 197 Citizens became more used to the idea of being watched and being constantly on the lookout. Vigilance had definitively become a part of the experience of modern urban citizenship.…”

Introducing vigilant audiences

“…On social media, citizens are engaging in tasks that traditionally fall within the authority of law enforcement agencies (LEAs). Examples include web-sleuthing collectives solving criminal cases or searching for missing persons (Yardley et al, 2016), specialised networks of paedophile-hunters (Campbell, 2016;Nhan et al, 2017), hacktivist groups revealing cybersecurity breaches or hacking back (E Silva, 2018;Schmidle, 2018) and online neighbourhood-watch schemes (Lub, 2018). Social media has opened up new sources of information about crime to citizens, and it facilitates participation in crime fighting.…”