Derry / Londonderry
Confidence & Satisfaction: Towards Novel Methods of Public Engagement and Community Policing in the Foyle Area.
It is a great pleasure for the VYV team to have Derry~Londonderry, the newly crowned UK City of Culture 2013, as one of our project partners. The Derry District Policing Partnership (DDPP) and Derry City Council (DCC) were amongst the first to support the VYV bid in 2009. As a result, the VYV team - in collaboration with the DDPP - was able to complete a unique research study that looked at public’s confidence and satisfaction with the local police force. The research was carried out between April and June 2010 and the results presented at the 8th National Crime Mapping Conference on 10-11 June in Manchester.
This was just days before the publication of the Saville Report, yet another turning point in the history of the City’s troubled past. The report was met with an emotional welcome by the large crowd gathered in the Guildhall Square. This was followed by the memorable apology of the UK Prime Minister David Cameron that described the Bloody Sunday events as ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’ opening, we argue, a bright new future of further civic engagement and dialog within the City.
Derry~Londonderry’s troublesome relationship with the police service dates back as early as the late 1960s. Between 1969 and 1972, barricades erected by nationalists defined the borders of ‘Free Derry’ with the Bogside area of the city to become a no-go area for the police. On the 30th January 1972, fourteen unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army during a civil rights march – an event which became known as Bloody Sunday. Given the history of the area, the authorities have placed special emphasis on improving the public’s confidence in the police. The DDPP is one of 26 district policing partnerships that were set up between district councillors and the local community to monitor local police performance, to represent community views on policing and to gain the public’s cooperation in crime prevention.
VYV & DDPP: Extracting Quantitative Data from Qualitative Information
DDPP uses a number of consultation methods to engage with the public which include regular public meetings and surveys. However, collecting people views about policing at local level it is a well-known challenge. For this the VYV team has been working with the DDPP to investigate how to supplement DDPP’s current consultation methods with techniques that may include the use of social media and mobile technology to allow a real-time ‘two way conversation’ with the public.
As a first step in this direction, VYV and DDPP agreed to further analyse the results of the household survey that DDPP conducted across the five neighbourhoods of the Derry District Area (Foyle) in August 2009. DDPP was the first in Northern Ireland to collect data on policing satisfaction and confidence at neighbourhood level. This was a postal survey with the aim of soliciting views from the public about the police service. The questionnaires contained multiple choice answers and the opportunity for the respondent to expand upon their selection in free text form. Traditionally, this free text is difficult and time consuming to summarise with the result that the verbatim answers are – at most – transcribed and included in reports as an appendix with no further analysis. This was also the case for the DDPP household survey report ‘This is a shame’ admits Dermot Harrigan, manager of the DDPP ‘the verbatim often contains the most useful information, but with current methods of analysis this information is lost’.
With the help of VYV technology, which allows for automated analysis of free text, the team was able to produce summaries of the key themes contained in the 800+ verbatim collected during the survey. This quantitative data helped identify recurrent topics which were not part of the multiple choice options and allowed comparison of people opinions across different areas of the City. Such data can now be used to map the public’s perceptions of Derry policing in real-time whilst including information which otherwise would have been missed.
Results, Reflections and Next
The results show an accuracy of VYV’s automatic theme extraction of 70%. This provides evidence that automatic text analysis can be used to create summaries of people views and to provide a way to navigate through public’s perceptions in the form of interactive maps. The ideas presented here are very much in keeping with recent developments in Gov 2.0 (e.g. Mysociety, SeeClickFix, and EcoSnoop), aiming at empowering citizens by giving them simple ways of using technology to engage with local government, or become more integrated with their community.
One issue with all of these applications is that potentially vast amounts of data are going to be produced and much of this will be textual, qualitative data. VYV is one of the first attempts to apply automatic text analysis in the context of such e-community applications. Ultimately, VYV aims to develop technologies to facilitate methods of public consultation and engagement. With complementary location information, VYV auto-analysis techniques can be applied to develop people perception maps in a broad range of domains.
Related Documents and Information
CMC 2010 Presentation [download Slides]
