Facilitating Pervasive Community Policing on the Road with Mobile Roadwatch

Abstract

We consider community policing on the road with pervasive recording technologies such as dashcams and smartphones where citizens are actively volunteering to capture and report various threats to traffic safety to the police via mobile apps. This kind of novel community policing has recently gained significant popularity in Korea and India. In this work, we identify people's general attitude and concerns toward community policing on the road through an online survey. We then address the major concerns by building a mobile app that supports easy event capture/access, context tagging, and privacy preservation. Our two-week user study (n = 23) showed Roadwatch effectively supported community policing activities on the road. Further, we found that the critical factors for reporting are personal involvement and seriousness of risks, and participants were mainly motivated by their contribution to traffic safety. Finally, we discuss several practical design implications to facilitate community policing on the road.