Crime prevention, swarm intelligence and stigmergy: Understanding the mechanisms of social media-facilitated community crime prevention
Wood, Mark A. and Thompson, Chrissy 2020, Crime prevention, swarm intelligence and stigmergy: Understanding the mechanisms of social media-facilitated community crime prevention, The British Journal of Criminology, pp. 1-20, doi: 10.1093/bjc/azaa065.
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Crime prevention, swarm intelligence and stigmergy: Understanding the mechanisms of social media-facilitated community crime prevention
Social media are now utilized extensively by Neighbourhood Watch-style initiatives; however, the impact social media have on the practices and mechanisms of community crime prevention remains under-theorized. Drawing on our observations of an Australian-based community crime prevention group over two-and-a-half years, this article develops a grounded theory of the mechanisms underpinning the group’s social media-facilitated practices of responding to local crime. We find that social media-facilitated Neighbourhood Watch is shaped by two phenomena that have yet to receive sustained attention in crime prevention research. These are swarm intelligence—a form of self-organization wherein collectives process information to solve problems that members cannot solve individually—and stigmergy: work that stimulates further work. In explaining how swarm intelligence and stigmergy interact with several of the long-acknowledged mechanisms and issues associated with Neighbourhood Watch, we emphasize the importance of examining how the media context of community crime prevention groups shapes their practices, behaviour and (in)efficacy.
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