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Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.

The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.

The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.

This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.

In what will be a regular column examining key issues facing community safety practitioners, Sarah Morton from Matrix Research and Consultancy discusses community involvement in crime and disorder reduction.Everyone appears to agree that increased community involvement is important because it can help to reassure members of the public as well as increase intelligence information gained from them. A variety of approaches for community engagement are discussed including the roll out of safer neighbourhood teams, which are felt to offer an opportunity to increase community empowerment further.

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

Simon Harding shares his opinions on the development and future of the community safety profession.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised unique challenges for police. Reductions in manpower due to officer illness and the need to social distance to suppress spread of the disease restricts the ability of police to fully engage with the public and deliver full services. Changes to policing strategies may affect residents’ feelings of safety and their relationships with police. The purpose of this study is to understand high crime area residents’ experiences with police and safety during the pandemic.

The current study draws on household surveys of residents across three high crime, disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis County, Missouri. We implemented three methods. First, we synthesized qualitative feedback about the impact on safety and policing. Second, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests compared pre-pandemic assessments of policing and safety measures to measures collected during the pandemic. Finally, we employed multinomial regression to examine how perceived changes in policing affected residents’ change in safety during the pandemic.

Residents saw police less and engaged with police less during the pandemic. They reported hearing gunshots more often. Reduced police presence in neighborhoods led to mixed effects on safety, largely decreasing residents’ feelings of safety. However, two factors that consistently improved safety were positive encounters with police and police being less involved with minor offenses.

This is the first study that assesses the pandemic impact on residents’ perceptions of safety and police in disadvantaged, high crime contexts.

This paper aims to examine the online communications, symbolism and imagery of 35 community crime prevention and crime watch groups across Canada to explore how these groups organize themselves and assess the resulting community actions.

Contributing to digital criminology, gathering data from open access platforms such as Facebook and online platforms such as websites, the authors analyse communications from community crime prevention and crime watch groups in 12 Canadian cities. The authors used qualitative content analysis to explore the types of posts to assess trends and patterns in types of ideas communicated and symbolized.

Whilst such groups bring the community together to help promote community safety, the groups may also encourage stereotyping, shaming and even vigilantism through misrepresenting the amount of crime occurring in the community and focusing on fear. The authors demonstrate how crime prevention becomes sidelined amongst most of the groups, and how intense crime reporting and the focus on fear derail actual community development.

The current study is limited to two years of posts from each group under examination. Interviews with members of online community crime prevention and crime watch groups would provide insights into the lived experience of regular users and their reasons for interacting with the group.

Given some of the vigilante-style the actions of such groups, the authors would suggest these groups pose a governance problem for local governments.

Community crime prevention and crime watch groups are not a new phenomenon, but their activities are moving online in ways that deserve criminological research. The authors contribute to the field of digital criminology by researching how online communications shape community crime prevention organizations and how ideas about regulation of crime and social control circulate online. The authors also explain how this community crime prevention trend may contribute to issues of vigilantism and increased transgression.

In the rhetoric and practice of community safety a paradox can be identified: despite the rhetoric of inclusivity and active citizenship, it appears that the views and interests of youth are largely ignored. Young people appear largely as a source of danger and fear of crime, leading to policy measures aimed at controlling and containing youth. There are four possible reasons for this: crime victim survey characteristics; a lack of political interest; youth as the inverse of the ‘ideal victim’; and young people as social scapegoats.

Belgium has experienced widespread change in its public sector. The author describes the structure of community safety provision that has resulted. This article describes research conducted in 4 Belgian cities. It argues for a conflict‐accepting model of partnership where the differing philosophies of the constituent agencies are accepted and where human creativity is respected. Such a model will reduce the problem of differential power relations that can lead to the exclusion of some social groups.