Social networks for police and residents in India

Abstract

Safety is a concern for most urban communities; residents interact in multiple ways with the police to address their safety concerns. Positive interactions with police help residents to feel safe. In developing countries, residents have started to use Online Social Networks (OSN) such as Facebook to share concerns and seek solutions. In this study, we investigate whether residents' post on OSN contain actionable information that police can use to address safety concerns and how residents use OSN to communicate with police. For this, we analyze residents' posts and comments on the Facebook page of Bangalore City Police, India, over a period of one month. Our results show that residents post information (including location) about various crimes such as neighborhood issues (drunkards, illegal construction), financial frauds, property crime, and thefts. In addition to crime, Facebook page gives information on residents' satisfaction and police performance. Majority of residents use police Facebook page to appreciate the good work of police. Police response to residents' post vary from ignore, acknowledge, reply, and follow-up. We find that police respond to most residents' post and help residents to reach the authority who can help solve the issue. Police adopt a formal communication style to interact with residents. We find that in addition to actionable information, OSN can help understand fear of crime among residents and develop mutual accountability between police and residents.

Hyper‐Local Fear of Crime: Identifying Linguistic Cues of Fear in Crime Talk on Reddit

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is a dearth of scholarship conceptualizing the fear of crime in online discourses. A pertinent study conducted by Sachdeva et al (Sachdeva & Kumaraguru, 2015) identified the lexicons in Indian residents' posts and comments on the Facebook page of Bangalore City Police. The results suggested that frequent keywords, such as fear , concern , worried , trouble , notice of , and issue , indicated residents' fear or concerns toward crime and could be applied to monitor public voices and build community policing.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is a dearth of scholarship conceptualizing the fear of crime in online discourses. A pertinent study conducted by Sachdeva et al (Sachdeva & Kumaraguru, 2015) identified the lexicons in Indian keywords, such as fear, concern, worried, trouble, notice of, and issue crime and could be applied to monitor public voices and build community policing. However, the proposed prior work that defined and measured the fear of crime offline and online but focuses on the online discourses about crime.…”

“…Generally speaking, the fear of crime is an emotional reaction people have toward crime or the anticipation related to being the victim of crime (Ferraro, 1995). To a lesser degree, studies have begun to explore how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can assist in mediating fear of crime (Sachdeva & Kumaraguru, 2015; Blom et al, 2010; Karusala & Kumar, 2017). Nevertheless, the disclosure of the fear of crime in online discourses is under‐researched despite the public's extensive crime‐related conversations.…”