If you've ever lived within the bounds of a Neighborhood Watch footprint, you have no doubt been astonished by the amount of crime in your community. Neighborhood Watch newsletters in most locales carry lists of burglaries and worse and their locations, all of which are in your neighborhood. For centuries it seems, our lack of ability to coordinate and distribute that information has hampered the reduction of crime.
Neighborhood Watch was revolutionary and through its newsletters, brought a much higher awareness of crime in the community, even if people heard after the event, it was better than not hearing at all.
Real time communication, in the context of combating neighborhood crime, is a game changer and may yet turnout to be quite significant in societal terms. Man has gathered together in communities for protection for 10,000 years, yet despite the recent proliferation of neighborhood watch organizations, the protection afforded by a modern neighborhood is still modest.
Just as repressed communities around the globe are attempting to use social software to organise themselves, the implementation of social software to make communities safer seems like a significant leap forward in living standards.
Social software start-up Village Defense has created software that links neighbours to form a real-time communication system - one phone call notifies all neighbors (by text or phone) when a crime or suspicious activity is in progress. In the first pilot study of the new system, the increased awareness, greater availability of witnesses and shorter response times facilitated by Village Defense saw crime rates dropped 58% in the first year.
