Leiden University Student Repository

Hanegem, Britt van (2024)

Exploring Police Dept Efforts In Building Trust, Cooperation, And Proactive Community Relations through Gaming

Bachelor thesis | Security Studies (BSc)

Community policing is important to enhance trust, legitimacy, and confidence in the police. Having an effective community policing strategy makes the job of police officers easier by having citizens be more willing to share information about cases. Community policing should take place where the community is and while before this was purely regional bound, there is now a shift towards the digital realm. Therefore, having a strategy surrounding this virtual community will benefit the big goal of community policing. The Dutch police force has thought of a particular strategy for this, they started the campaign “gamen met de politie”. This thesis will analyse this campaign from a functionally working, technical, and social perspective to understand what kind of impact this campaign has on the community policing efforts. The main research question will be answered through three sub-questions related to the perspectives. The methods used will be deductive research through a document study...Show moreCommunity policing is important to enhance trust, legitimacy, and confidence in the police. Having an effective community policing strategy makes the job of police officers easier by having citizens be more willing to share information about cases. Community policing should take place where the community is and while before this was purely regional bound, there is now a shift towards the digital realm. Therefore, having a strategy surrounding this virtual community will benefit the big goal of community policing. The Dutch police force has thought of a particular strategy for this, they started the campaign “gamen met de politie”. This thesis will analyse this campaign from a functionally working, technical, and social perspective to understand what kind of impact this campaign has on the community policing efforts. The main research question will be answered through three sub-questions related to the perspectives. The methods used will be deductive research through a document study and coding the comments of livestreams from the campaign. The analysis has shown that the application works but could be promoted better. That on the technical level, the campaign is faster but can be more difficult for older police officers and lastly on the social impact level that there is engagement from the youth as well as from the police officers which stimulates trust in community engagement. Thus the campaign certainly fills a gap in community policing in the virtual world, but for now it only targets a small group of the youth which are interested and financially able to join this campaignShow less

community policing, games

Author

Hanegem, Britt van

Faculty

Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs

Supervisors

De Paepe, J.

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en