Barcelona, Spain, January 2020 – The Cutting Crime Impact (CCI) project, which seeks to enable law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other public authorities to reduce the impact of petty crime, organised a DesignLab session on “measuring and mitigating citizens’ feeling of insecurity”, on 30-31 January in Barcelona (ES).
> Mapping out the various aspects of the feelings of insecurity
DesignLab is a method used in group work to analyse a situation or problem and produce innovative ideas to remedy it. This session was built on Cutting Crime Impact’s “Insecurity LifeCycle Model”, which is an alternative way of assessing feelings of insecurity from the person’s individual experience and their context and background. The model allows for mapping out different aspects of such feelings, from worry to anxiety and fear.
The objective of the DesignLab session was to help law enforcement agency (LEA) representatives to come up with ideas of tools that could contribute to reducing feelings of insecurity among the population. The project partners first worked in small groups before voting on the ideas they deemed most interesting, such as protocols to improve communication with actors on the ground, technological hubs to improve the exchange of information, and ideas to reach out to the most vulnerable and hard to reach groups of population.
> Next phase: prototyping the toolkits addressing the project’s four areas of work
The meeting was also the occasion for the LEAs to present their concept and development plan for the toolkits that emerged from the previous DesignLab session, organised in September 2019.
Furthermore, representatives of the project’s advisory board – Gian Guido Nobili, Head of the Italian Forum for Urban Security (FISU), Umberto Nicolini, Director of LabQUS (Laboratorio Qualità Urbana e Sicurezza) and Chair of the EU Cost Action TU1203–Crime Prevention Through Urban Design and Planning, and Jaap de Waard, Senior Policy Advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice – made a number of suggestions to improve the operationalisation of the four sets of toolkits. These cover the project’s four areas of work, i.e. 1) predictive policing; 2) community policing; 3) crime prevention through urban design and planning; 4) measuring and mitigating citizens’ feelings of insecurity.
In the next phase of the project, the partner LEAs will start prototyping them.
> About the CCI project
Started in October 2018 for a period of three years, the Cutting Crime Impact project seeks to develop tools to better measure feelings of insecurity, reduce the impact of petty crime, and if possible prevent it.
Led by the University of Salford, it gathers, besides Efus, DSP Groep bv; the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Catalonia; Globaz SA; the German Crime Prevention Institute; the State Police of Lower Saxony; the police and border forces of Estonia; the municipal police of Lisbon; the police force of Greater Manchester; the national police of Holland, and Rijks University Groningen.
> More information on the project’s website
