Human versus Technology: Comparing the effect of Private Security patrol and Crime Prevention Information System over the Crime Level and Safety perception

Crime reduction became one of the major issues of the modern society. In order to achieve public reassurance, police forces all over the world are undertaking actions to involve citizens in crime prevention through community policing. In parallel, technological platforms were deployed in order to share crime-related information with the public and to support the development of problem-solving strategies. However, the impact of these initiatives in terms of crime reduction and perception has not been sufficiently investigated yet. Furthermore, up to now, no previous studies compared the effectiveness between the traditional approach of preventive patrolling and technology-based crime prevention solutions. Therefore, we present a study design which aims at assessing the effectiveness of the two aforementioned crime prevention measures. The goal is to evaluate and compare their effects over the local criminal activity and citizen’s safety perception measured by Fear of Crime (FOC) and Perceived Risk of Victimization (PRV) constructs. Preliminary results show a rather low level of FOC across the whole sample, paired by a high level of PRV. Furthermore, potential explanatory background factors for the previous constructs have been identified and will be explored in future work.