All-in-One Next-Generation Community Policing Solution Powered by Crowd-Sourcing, Data Analytics, and Decision Support: The INSPEC 2 T Case

Community Policing (CP) is gaining popularity with police and governments as well as citizens, aiming to improve crime prevention and safety. Multiple ICT tools for CP have emerged to ease citizens’ engagement with CP activities. Most of them are, however, tailor-made to the specific needs of their direct users in a city or country or provide fragmented functions focusing, for instance, on citizens’ tools or police-related work. This chapter presents an end-to-end fully featured privacy respectful innovative solution for Community Policing, resulting from the H2020-funded INSPEC2T Project. Using a rich set of functions for incident reporting and citizen–police communication and collaboration tools, it provides an intelligent data analytics layer to effectively process the bulk of citizens’ data with the aim to facilitate and improve police work. It further offers a special-purpose community platform to allow citizens to communicate and collaborate effectively among themselves and with the police to resolve safety-related situations in their local societies. Feedback received from pilots has demonstrated its value within stakeholder communities. This chapter presents the INSPEC2T solution as a promising CP approach to meet the needs of all stakeholders involved in CP.