Author: Margo Molkenbur, German Prevention Congress (DPT)
CCI project partner, DPT has organised a series of webinars, which highlight the CCI project touching on the projects four focus areas. Presenters from the CCI partner Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) who have developed specific tools and external speakers will discuss these focus areas in greater detail.
The biggest plus point and a very special aspect of the CCI project is that half a year is dedicated within the project timeline to bring the fully developed tools into practice and to implement them in a targeted and professional manner. In many projects the project period ends immediately after the completion of a developed product, which is then let out into the world of crime prevention in the hope that it will be used in practice. CCI has planned from the very beginning to closely accompany the subsequent exploitation of its products. The step-by-step process of prototyping, demonstration and implementation makes it possible to further adapt and develop the CCI tools to the needs of the end-users; to explain to the end-users and decision-makers what exactly the tools are, what they help with and how exactly they are used in practice. As part of this dissemination and communication of the project results, DPT is pleased to offer a CCI Webinar series that supports in making the various outcomes of the project accessible to an international audience.
The launch webinar of the ten-part series took place in March 2021. Here, Professor Caroline Davey and Andrew Wootton, Director of the Design Against Crime Solution Centre at the University of Salford and lead partners of the CCI project, presented the special research approach of the project. Namely a very human-centred, very focused on end-user needs, very bottom-up, and very innovative methodology.
The webinars in April and May focused on the topic of community policing. In April, Dr Megan O'Neill (University of Dundee) and Dr Roberta Signori (Greater Manchester Police and CCI project partner) spoke about Neighbourhood Policing in England and presented their tool developed in the CCI project, which improves the handover process when neighbourhood officers and staff move to another post. As they are often responsible for the same neighbourhood for several years, they build up an important relationship of trust with the citizens and have special knowledge about this local area, its inhabitants, the problems and dynamics there. When these officers change jobs, they often take these unique resources of knowledge and relationships with them. This is where the tool "Community Connect" comes in. In May, Simone Tulumello (University of Lisbon) and Mónica Diniz (Lisbon Municipal Police and CCI project partner) spoke about community policing in Portugal, the specific model in Lisbon and their tool "Lisbon Community Policing - Safer Communities", which helps to engage and convince key decision makers in the implementation of community policing projects.
For more information on all past webinars, visit the DPT-Institute for Applied Prevention Research (DPT-I) website. The recordings of these cost-free webinars can easily be found on the CCI website, DPT´s YouTube channel, or CCI Project´s YouTube channel.
But that's not all. Seven more webinars are planned for 2021 - one every month. The next one will be taking place on July 13, as usual at 16.00 (CEST), on measuring and mitigating citizens' feelings of unsafety and what concrete solutions and new approaches the project partners in Germany and Spain have developed for this. In August and September, there will be webinars on predictive policing and the tools the project partners in the Netherlands and Germany have developed to improve data-based police crime prevention. Two more webinars, in October and November, will focus on crime prevention through urban design and planning. The project partners in Estonia and England are already working intensively in this area and have identified aspects they would like to improve in a requirements analysis and have each developed a tool for this in the CCI project.
The webinar series will conclude with an interesting closing event on December 14. Here we would like to review the CCI project and take a final look at our CCI journey: What did we expect? What did we experience? What did we learn from? Where did we stumble? What did we achieve? Where do we see further needs? What should we build on in the future? Let's take a joint look at the future of European police crime prevention and what our role in it could be.
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the CCI Webinar Series Margo Molkenbur ([email protected]) would be pleased to hear from you.
