Police forces in the UK and the US have received increasing media attention for the negative ways in which some police officers have engaged with local communities, such as members of ethnic minority groups. For example, there has been criticism of several high-profile tragic deaths of black men in the USA (Quick 2024), while in Britain the Head of the Metropolitan Police in London recently acknowledged the discrimination experienced by LGTB+ groups at the hands of his officers (Rawlinson 2023).

Community engagement is undertaken in different ways in different contexts. Some approaches, such as public consultation, have become common in many countries and in diverse public services. While the empirical work of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues (Parks et al. 1981) on the interaction between communities and the Chicago Police force shaped the concept of user and community co-production of public services and outcomes (Loeffler and Bovaird 2020), policing has a complex relationship to community participation and co-production, given that policing contains both coercive and welfare elements in its service. As Hartley et al. (2023: 1724) state, “policing is a prime example of a public service that subjects citizens to the authority of the state, in having state authority to use coercive (even lethal at times) physical force against its own citizens and residents”. However, some communities are exploring how safety – broadly defined to include but extend beyond policing – can be co-produced (Lemmie et al. 2021). This raises the question how police forces engage with perceive ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, who typically lack trust in police officers and would rather avoid coming into contact with police services, let alone engage with them voluntarily. This paper examines this question in the context of police forces in the UK and USA, both currently liberal democracies.

This paper will distinguish between two forms of community engagement (Loeffler and Martin 2024):

1) Participation in public decision-making – a less intensive interaction between public organisations and communities where each party has a role in decision-making. This may involve deliberative forums.

2) Co-production of public services and outcomes – the most intensive form of engagement, where citizens and professionals harness each other’s resources and capabilities with the aim of improving public outcomes and/or public services through co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery or co-assessment.

The paper is based on a narrative literature review of academic and policy literature and case studies on community engagement in policing to examine frameworks and examples of participation and co-production in the two countries. It will explore how police forces engage with highly diverse communities, including majority and minority groups. This review will illuminate how participation and co-production opportunities in policing are envisioned in the U.S. and U.K. contexts, allowing us to identify areas of commonality and difference, consider their relationships with the specific characteristics of different policing services, and suggest some possibilities for improving engagement.

This paper contributes to the themes identified for this working group by exploring the regional performance of collaborations created to provide local police services in the U.S. We utilize the network science concept of multilayer networks to examine the structure, composition, and interdependence of multiple interorganizational networks producing key components of police services and link them to measures of crime in the region. These component networks represent different “layers” in the police services network and include agreements between two or more organizations that: (1) create contracts to provide police services, (2) commitments for the provision of mutual aid, (3) arrangements for sharing personnel, equipment, or funding, and (4) working groups composed of personnel from multiple organizations to address shared problems. Traditional analyses in this literature examine single networks that are subsets of larger systems, ignoring the impacts of the interdependence of these networks created by shared memberships, and how these organizations impact the robustness of the system.

This project also contributes to our understanding of other themes identified for this session, such as critical governance processes, political accountability, and the consequences of differences among collaborating organizations in power and equity. Academic and professional discussions linking collaborations among local governments to outcomes often emphasize functional consolidation, the use of contracting, and differences in financial and technical capacity of governments, and diffusion of best practices across space and time. This analysis contributes to each of these topics in a novel way.

This project has descriptive and explanatory objectives. Relying on a statutory requirement in the state of Iowa requiring local governments to submit agreements for intergovernmental and intersectoral collaboration to a public archive, we describe the resulting networks of police services created in the state’s 81 counties over 20 years. Our explanatory research examines the link between changes in network structure (centralization and transitivity), network composition (sector diversity and geographic range), and tie properties (stability and strength) and community level measures of substantive policy outcomes. Using fixed effects models, we examine how changes in the structure and composition of these county-level networks affect measures of property and violent crime. Preliminary findings suggest that network properties matter, but that the impact of specific properties vary across the layers examined. We conclude with an examination of resources and other features of key organizations in the multi-layer network that affect the robustness of these police service networks.

Through the proliferation of digital technologies such as cameras and tracking devices, and options to share and analyse online open source content, citizens’ capacity to self-organize and undertake a variety of law enforcement tasks has expanded. Consequently, citizens are increasingly taking on policing roles, thereby extending the realm of policing beyond government law enforcement efforts. Digital citizen-led policing encompasses a wide range of activities, from crowdsourcing intelligence in search of missing persons, to exposing scammers and groomers in undercover operations, and leveraging self-taught digital forensics to analyze evidence on crime. Labels such as open source intelligence (OSINT), scambaiting, neighbourhood watch and paedophile hunting refer to specific manifestations this emergent phenomenon.

In some cases, citizens seek to maintain good working relations with government authorities and assume professional norms similar to those of the police. However, other manifestations of digital citizen-led policing actively challenge the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This is most visible in instances in which citizens resort to extra-legal forms of punishment, for example through doxing or physical confrontation of suspected offenders. Although digital citizen-led policing is becoming more widespread, it is yet unclear how digital citizen-led policing relates to existing security arrangements.

Plural policing and nodal governance literature has predominantly focused on public-private partnerships between police and private security actors. These partnerships are established at the initiative of the police and they typically rely on contractual or relation steering to assure that security partners comply with police norms and standards, which, according to this literature, is a prerequisite for security arrangements to be effective. This paper studies how newly available digital resources, tools and platforms shape the aims and norms of citizen-led policing in order to explore how digital citizen-led policing could fit existing security arrangements.

Departing from a virtual ethnographic research approach, this study uses a combination of social media analysis and interviews to study four cases of digital citizen-led policing in the Dutch context. The cases include an online neighbourhood watch community, factfinding during a hostage situation, justice seeking for the victim of violence, and an online community dedicated to online scammers. The analysis focuses on how the appropriation of digital tools and methods shape the definitions of deviance and justice and social norms for action which are upheld within these communities.

This research contributes to existing literature on plural policing by exploring digital citizen-led policing initiatives which have emerged and operate outside traditional public-private partnerships. It seeks to develop an understanding of its various manifestations, motivations, and implications and reflects on how these relate to current security arrangements. Furthermore, by providing insight in the emerging phenomenon of digital citizen-led policing, this research will offer insights for policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and other security actors. It highlights potential challenges and opportunities associated with integrating digital citizen-led policing into traditional security arrangements.