Britta Elena Hecking | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Building A Civic Tool for Community-Police Engagement to Adapt Neighborhood Policing

Data-driven policing often prioritizes incident records over residents' lived experiences. In the Baltic city of Riga, with a history of distrust and limited community-police engagement, this can further alienate the public. To bridge this gap, we propose a Research through Design (RtD) inquiry into the development of Par drošu Rīgu, a civic tool for community-data-integrated policing. With municipal police, NGOs, and city staff, we ask how RtD enables stakeholder negotiation and which interaction qualities support trust and the use of combined community and incident data. The co-design process included workshops that surfaced divergent notions of safety; material probes designed as boundary objects to negotiate among stakeholders; and a pilot deployment showing how combining quantitative and qualitative data reshapes engagement and trust. Mixed-methods evaluation suggests increased officer-citizen interaction, but frictions in sustaining stakeholder collaboration. We contribute (i) an empirical RtD inquiry with public institutions, (ii) an artifact combining physical and dashboard interactions, and (iii) reflections on interaction design as a boundary-spanning practice for trust and infrastructuring.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Co-Designing with Multiple Stakeholders and Datasets: A Community-Centered Process to Understand Youth Deviance in the Italian City of Turin

This paper presents the co-design and design evaluation of Sbocciamo Torino civic tool, which helps understand and act upon the issues of youth deviance in the Italian city of Turin through multi-stakeholder collaboration and collaborative data analysis. Rooted in research through design and participatory design methodologies, the civic tool integrates a data dashboard, stakeholder committee, and structured co-design sessions to facilitate collaborative analysis and intervention planning. The civic tool was developed in partnership with municipal authorities, law enforcement, NGOs, and social services, and reflects their institutional priorities while centering community knowledge. We describe the iterative co-design process, including stakeholder workshops for design, validation, training, and evaluation. The civic tool's impact on stakeholder trust, collaboration, and decision-making was assessed through surveys and open-ended questionnaires. Our findings show that stakeholders valued the inclusive design approach and data-driven collaboration while revealing barriers in communication, data literacy, and operational coordination. Furthermore, political and institutional support was identified as critical to the civic tool's success. This paper contributes to research on community technologies by demonstrating how civic tools can be collaboratively developed to navigate wicked social problems through participatory design.

cs.HC↗