Development of a Mobile Community Policing System

Abstract:

Community is a network of people that interrelate via physical or virtual technologies for different social purposes by exchanging information and share idea on mutual interests. Community and police work together to combat crime in the community. In academic Institution like University of Lagos (UNILAG), community safety depends on school security and police to curtail crime to barest minimum within the academic society while security officers also depend on members of community to give them vital information about crime activities in their domains on time. In contemporary environment, relationships between community members and police have increased due to different social technologies available to report crime situation in the community. A mobile-based community policing system has been developed to assist school security and police to mitigate crimes with useful and timely information about criminals and their modes of operations. Prototype based mobile community policing application was designed to report crime activities from community members irrespective of locations they found themselves without having facial contact with police. Implementation of Mobile Community Policing is focus of this project; it is designed by using Java, Basic4Android and Google SDK for front-end interface while PHP, SQLITE and MYSQL are used to design application backend.

Keywords: Community policing, Crime reporting, three-tiers architecture, Neighbourhood watch, Mobile technology