Designing a mobile system for public safety using open crime data and crowdsourcing

Abstract

With more cities opening up crime data and the proliferation of participatory sensing, we explore ways to improve public safety of a local community by using open crime data and crowdsourcing. We first conducted an online survey to better understand the public safety needs of the Syracuse University (SU) community. Inspired by the survey results, we developed and deployed an Android mobile app in collaboration with the Department of Public Safety (DPS) at SU; the app integrates published safety incidents on a Google Map and SU campus alerts. We present our experience of co-designing this system with the DPS, challenges and experience of our initial app release. To design effective crowdsourcing of public safety information, we conducted a lab experiment to investigate what factors affect people's sharing decisions. The results suggest that both time of day and type of location significantly affect people's sharing decisions. These insights inform a re-design of our system to "nudge" people to report safety related information timely.