Keeping an eye on the neighbours: Police, citizens, and communication within mobile neighbourhood crime prevention groups
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Anouk Mols,Yijing Wang,Jason Pridmore,Frank Holleman |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X18768397 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Keeping an eye on the
neighbours: Police, citizens,
and communication within
mobile neighbourhood
crime prevention groups
Jason Pridmore, Anouk Mols, Yijing Wang
and Frank Holleman
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Mobile neighbourhood crime prevention has become increasingly popular in the
Netherlands. Since 2015, 7,250 WhatsApp neighbourhood crime prevention (WNCP)
groups have been registered online, most of which are initiated and moderated by
citizens. This entails a form of participatory policing aimed at neighbourhood crime pre-
vention, which may provoke increased feelings of anxiety and interpersonal surveillance.
Community police officers and citizens need to adapt to changed interactions and
trust relations in the neighbourhood. This mixed-methods research examines both the
mediation of messaging applications and its implementation by both citizens and police,
indicating the tensions and negotiations around formal and informal ‘policing’.
Keywords
Participatory policing, neighbourhood watch, WhatsApp, police engagement, community
police
Introduction
Safety is not only a task f or police and the judicial syst em. Citizens, companies, an d
organisations are jointly responsible.
Corresponding author:
Jason Pridmore, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication,
Woudestein Campus, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: pridmore@eshcc.eur.nl
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
2019, Vol. 92(2) 97–120
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032258X18768397
journals.sagepub.com/home/pjx
This sentence, written in a coalition agreement of the Dutch government in 2007
(translated from Dutch, Coalitieakkoord, 2007: 10), represents the start of an increasing
shift towards an integration of safety activities between citizens and police. In the years
since, a significant means by which this integration has begun to occur in the Netherlands
is through neighbourhood watch-style crime prevention groups,
1
which have become
increasingly popular in the Netherlands (Lub, 2016). These groups were already very
popular elsewhere, as they started to emerge in Western countries since the 1980s
(Bennet et al., 2006). Patrol-focused neighbourhood groups consist of proactive neigh-
bours that regularly patrol the streets, organise safety-oriented activities, engage in house
visits, assist the police and maintain order (Husain, 1988; Laycock and Tilly, 1995).
Though the first Dutch neighbourhood crime prevention group dates back to the 1980s
(Van Noije and Wittebrood, 2008), the presence of patrol-focused neighbourhood crime
prevention groups has been limited in the Netherlands. A recent study mentions the
existence of 700 patrol-focused groups in half of the Dutch municipalities (Lub, 2017).
It is only recently that mobile phone-based neighbourhood crime prevention (buurt-
preventie in Dutch) messaging groups have emerged in ways that both supplement and
supplant the patrol-focused neighbourhood groups. At present, these messaging groups
rely upon mobile phone applications which connect neighbours and enable real-time
discussions about safety and (potential) cr iminal activity. WhatsApp neighbourhood
crime prevention (WNCP) groups are currently active in more than 7,250 neighbour-
hoods across the Netherlands and Belgium (WhatsApp Buurtpreventie, 2017), far greater
numbers than their patrol-focused neighbourhood crime prevention counterparts. Within
these mobile device-based groups, neighbours are connected via a chat application. Most
often in the Netherlands this is through the application WhatsApp, but alternatives like
Telegram and Nextdoor are also gaining popularity. These applications facilitate neigh-
bours in exchanging warnings, concerns, advice and information about neighbourhood
safety, and often the moderators of these groups are in contact with community police
officers and/or with other neighbourhood watch group moderators.
The emergence of these groups has been rather spontaneous and unorganised. What is
clear is that these groups first appeared in the past four to five years, with this becoming
more organised recently. Professional organisations such as Nextdoor promote neigh-
bourhood applications and in June 2015, a connection site emerged that allows persons to
find and connect to different Whatsapp neighbourhood crime prevention groups (see
https://wabp.nl/). It seems that the proliferation of smartphones, reliably available and
affordable mobile data, the high penetration rates of particular messaging services like
WhatsApp, a societal propensity towa rds ‘openness’ and a ‘long history advocating
cooperation in the fight against so-called petty crimes’ (van Eijk, 2017: 5) have come
together to make the mobile monitoring of neighbourhoods both desirable and accessi-
ble. As such, according to a recent study, WhatsApp neighbourhood crime prevention
groups have led to a significant and prolonged decline of burglaries in certain neighbour-
hoods in the Dutch city of Tilburg (Akkermans and Vollaard, 2015). Yet this constant
contact among neighbours can also result in increased interpersonal surveillance, ethnic
profiling, vigilantism, increased anxiety, communication overload and tensions among
participants (Lub, 2016). These practices can be seen as ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) policing,
98 The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 92(2)
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