An evaluative study on mobile crowdsourcing applications for crime watch

Abstract

ICT technological revolution has inadvertently changed the way people share and disseminate information. Today, information sharing has been made possible globally; people are empowered to contribute skills, knowledge and expertise regardless of their physical location, hence, the emergence of crowdsourcing. This new concept is evolving in many fields ranging from world mapping, health monitoring, disaster relief to crime prevention. Many studies have shown that crowdsourcing serves as a promising new approach in gathering information. Success stories by Google, OpenStreetMap, and Wikimapia inspired organizations including local authorities to try this new method for their own use. In this paper, we evaluate 6 mobile applications which use crowdsourcing to report crime related incidents. The evaluation is done based on 7 criteria that are found to be important based on literatures. These include map viewing, crime listing, incident sharing, authority reporting, media sharing, tutorial and supported system. A conclusive evaluation is performed and future works related to this research are discussed at the end of the paper. © 2014 IEEE.