Cyberhood Watch (CW), or Crowd-Community Policing, was a joint project between SOCIAM, the University of Southampton, and Hampshire County Council, aiming to provide a digital space for the reporting and verification of information that could be used to improve public safety and wellbeing.
The goal of CW was to enable people to quickly and easily report issues, regardless of how trivial, that might be useful for others. Such increased reporting could allow more accurate detection of potential serious threats before they occur, such as by identifying suspicious behaviours or other residual clues of threats and having them reported in an accurate and timely manner. To make such reports useful, CW harnessed crowdsourcing capability to quickly categorise and classify the issue, so that the information could be vetted for accuracy, and be organised and re-presented with minimal latency.
CW worked through a mobile app available on Android, the most popular smartphone platform. It was deployed on a trial basis at the University of Southampton.
