Social Networks and Citizen Participation in the Collaborative Community Policing—A Case Study of S Community in Beijing

Abstract

It is of great significance to enhance collaborative community policing for crime prevention and better community-police relationships. Understanding the relational structure of collaborative community policing is necessary to pinpoint the pattern of interactions among key actors involved in community policing and improve the effectiveness of network governance. Based on 234 surveys of citizens of S Community in Beijing from April 2017 to May 2017, this paper empirically examines the characteristics of formal network and informal network of citizen participation in the collaborative community policing. Beijing is widely known for its active involvement of neighborhood volunteers in different types of community policing. We focused on four different types of interpersonal work relationships in this study: workflow, problem solving, mentoring and friendship, among resident committees, neighborhood administrative offices, media, police station, business security personnel, neighborhood volunteers, and security activists. The nature of relationships between individuals in networks can be treated as from instrumental ties to expressive ties. Expressive ties cover relationships that involve the exchange of friendship, trust, and socio-emotional support. We extended this intra-organizational insight into a community policing inter-organizational context. The collaborative network showed the trend of the distributed network. The clustering analysis showed that in the workflow network, we should make full use of the close interaction between the citizens and activists in the community. Meanwhile, in the problem-solving network, mentoring network and friendship network, interactions between citizens and neighborhood committee are weak. 89 comprehensive management of community policing is consistent with the concept of shared governance. The comprehensive management of community policing means that the transformation started from the traditional management of community policing to multi-participations in the comprehensive management of community policing.This article investigates the comprehensive management of community policing based on the social network method. Taking S community citizens in Beijing as an example, this paper observes the role of citizens in S community in Beijing in comprehensive governance, and studies the role of workflow network, problem-solving network, mentoring network, and friendship network. 99 actors (resident committees, neighborhood administrative offices, media, police station, business security personnel, neighborhood volunteers, and security activists) depend on the location of the node. Resident committees and media have a direct and strong relationship with other actors and are highly influential members of the network, thus occupying a strategic position of the network. Neighborhood volunteers rank third in the degree of workflow network, mentoring network, and friendship network, while ranking fourth in the degree of problem-solving network, indicating the impact of neighborhood volunt...