June 2023 – Ensuring that citizens can freely and securely visit and use their city’s public spaces is a priority for all local authorities. But how to protect such spaces while keeping them open to all? This is a complex challenge for local authorities.
Indeed, it is an area involving many stakeholders from a range of disciplines and various levels of governance (local, national, European), which requires a degree of knowledge of the most commonly used security technologies.
Free online training for local crime prevention and security actors
Does your job entail taking decisions to better protect urban public spaces? Do you work for a municipality or other public or private organisation, such as a police force or an urban planning/architecture firm? Are you seeking to upgrade your skills, or those of your team and partners, in this particular field?
The European Forum for Urban Security (Efus) offers a free online training platform, which came on stream in May 2023.
A practical, comprehensive tool
This unique, user-friendly tool was specifically designed to cater to the needs of local and regional authorities and their local partners. It includes theoretical and practical knowledge on four major domains of public space protection:
● analysing the vulnerabilities of a given public space;
● crime prevention through environmental design;
● crisis communication;
● the ethical use of security technologies.
All the contents are available online, thus allowing trainees to follow the programme at their pace. The platform includes a self-evaluation tool, and a certificate is provided upon completion.
This training programme was designed and tested by the partners of the Secu4All European project, which Efus led between December 2020 and June 2023.
The Secu4All project
The Secu4All project gathered four European cities and regions (Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium; city of The Hague, Netherlands; municipal police of Riga, Latvia, and city of Xábia, Spain), five European research centres and universities, and three national Forums for Urban Security (French, German and Italian Forums), which are all part of the European Forum for Urban Security. Funded by the European Commission’s Internal Security Fund-Police, the project sought to strengthen the capacities of local and regional authorities to better protect their public spaces by providing them with the necessary knowledge and practical tools to better anticipate and tackle the specific risks that affect public spaces.
Secu4All will conclude with a final conference on 13 June 2023 during which the partners will present the project’s main results and insights.
