2.4. Suggested projects and activities

2.4. Suggested projects and activities

The whole idea of applying the City Resilience Framework in a context is to identify gaps and vulnerabilities to empower the various stakeholders including the residents of the cities to build capacities, to avert crisis. The indicators “Effective systems in deterring crime” and “Competent policing” analyzed in the context of Trondheim, helped in the identification of certain gaps in the policing processes. The PHS though has identified the requirement of further research in ICT in preventing crimes, Norway still has a long way to go in developing predictive policing techniques that are already put in use in majority of the developed nations.

California for example, has developed an analytical program called Predpol, a decisionsupport system for patrolling (Figure 4). The program conducts based on type of crime, place and time a risk assessment to predict where and when a similar incident could take place in the immediate future. The program does not use arrest data or information that can be linked to individuals, thus including ethical constraints into the program (Huet, 2015).

Figure 4 – Deputy chief at Santa Cruz Police department explaining how PredPol indicates the risk of new offences (Predpol, 2014)

The program though does not tell the patrols what to do, but ensures that the police resources will be allocated with precision. Additionally, the risk maps also have the feature to be updated before each new patrol shift (Lum and Isaac, 2016).

Another example is the city of Memphis, where crime was quite prevalent between 2006 and 2012. The Memphis police department constructed an analytical program called the ‘BLUE Crush’ which produces crime forecasts within a limited geographical area by compiling and analyzing historical crime data from police records integrating the real-time data from the patrols (Tulumello, 2016). This information is then plotted on digital maps and is shared with the patrols through mobile phone devices. The police departments of Bavaria and Zurich as well have sought the help of an analytics software called ‘Precobs’, which predicts the location and time of the next burglary that might take place within a radius of 500 meters, over the next seven days based on the historical anonymized burglary data, portraying it on a digital map (Sommerer, 2017).

While the above mentioned analytical software are helpful for the police in deterring crime, another aspect here, which involves the residents of the city is yet to be focused on. The relationship between the people and the police is something that should be worked on. Community policing is one option which has been tried and tested by the US department of justice, where one police officer is allocated to certain communities so that they become engage and become familiar with the local inhabitants (Oliver, 1992). This strategy effectively helps is building partnerships with the governance