Africa's Information Revolution: Implications for Crime, Policing, and Citizen Security

This 60-page report, published by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, discusses how the rapid expansion and accessibility of mobile communications technology in Africa is creating new opportunities for combatting crime and strengthening police accountability. Twitter, SMS, and event-mapping technologies are being used to connect communities with police and security forces. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), often tapping into their crowdsourcing capabilities, also offer opportunities to improve police responsiveness and accountability. Crime maps provide the basis for allocating resources to match prevailing threats. However, while opening opportunities to enhance security and accountability, ICTs are not a panacea for resolving crime and corruption. Rather, ICT-generated change requires an organised body of committed individuals who can use the increased accessibility of information to educate the public, engender popular participation, and press authorities for reform.

According to the report, violent crime represents the most immediate threat to the personal security of most Africans. The risk of violent crime has implications for Africa’s development, governance, and stability. Crime ranks as one of the major inhibitors to investment on the continent according to private business owners. Parents choose not to send children to school rather than put them at risk in highcrime areas. Countries with higher rates of violent crime tend to make less progress in reducing poverty and expanding development.

The report explains that the rapid absorption and adaptation of new information and communications technology across Africa creates numerous opportunities to address widespread insecurity and crime, particularly in Africa’s urban slums. Advances in imaging and data management can improve police effectiveness and optimise the application of scarce state resources, while mobile telephony and other ICTs can lay the groundwork for collective action and police-community engagement in previously inconceivable ways. ICTs also provide the tools to confront deeper institutional challenges. Three particular types of ICTs underpin these potential advancements: high-fidelity imaging, data processing, and management, and communication, whether by telephone, SMS, or internet-enabled smartphones.

The success of ICT-based initiatives is contingent upon the strength, size, and competency of the networks and groups that launch and sustain them. By lowering information barriers, ICTs are bringing discussion and analysis of crime in Africa out of the shadows, enhancing the potential for oversight of the security forces, and elevating citizen security. ICTs, therefore, are contributing to improved security through both internal channels via the strengthening of the state’s crime data gathering capacity as well as external mechanisms to monitor, critique, and hold the security sector accountable. However, it is sustained engagement of on-the-ground actors, typically in the form of civil society organisations, that transforms information accessibility into concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary citizens.

The report offers the following recommendations:

• Collective Action to Improve Community Security: The report explains that ICTs provide African communities versatile tools to quickly and cheaply improve their individual and collective security. There are steps that communities can pursue to mitigate crime with limited outside intervention, but their success will depend upon the degree to which community members are organised. For this reason, international NGOs, international organisations, and funding agencies interested in strengthening ICT-based crime-mitigating capacity should facilitate rather than instigate such initiatives and let locally based community organisers lead the operation on the ground. The most appropriate role for international partners is to provide material assistance and perhaps technical assistance, though even the latter can be problematic. African problems are being addressed in ingenious ways by African technologists. International partners should focus on more funding, better equipment, and some training.
• Police Effectiveness: Information and communications technologies can serve as dramatic force multipliers for Africa’s often overwhelmed and cash-strapped police forces. With high-fidelity imaging, police can familiarise themselves with large expanses of places, even the often confusing layout of densely populated slums. Supplemented with simple data management software, police can begin to build vital crime maps so as to better concentrate their limited resources and personnel. Expanding access to mobile phones also means that police can stay in contact with individuals more frequently, easily, and cheaply, thereby enhancing reporting and communication. The challenge with such applications of ICTs is that greater police accountability is needed to prevent these tools from becoming the source of more efficient extortion or brutality by the police. The adoption of ICTs, then, must be accompanied by strict regulations that require the police to be transparent with the information they collect. For instance, civil society organisations should be allowed access to the locator logs in new police vehicles and/or to records from camera feeds. Data and reports should be shared publicly and frequently.
• Community-Police Engagement: ICT tools provide simple but persistent linkages between African communities and police, potentially in ways that can overcome the lack of trust between these groups. With mobile phones, Africans can more quickly and easily report incidents to the police and provide intelligence on criminal activities. Police, meanwhile, can maintain active links with under-policed areas despite their common personnel shortages. Such community-police engagement can become more sophisticated over time. It may begin by improving reporting and communication but eventually can include police collecting data on crime through crowdsourcing in affected communities so that effective countermeasures can be taken to contain and prevent recurring crime patterns. A lack of crime data is another major barrier to fighting crime more systematically. Therefore, community-based crowdsourcing data-collection exercises in select municipalities could go a long way toward filling the yawning gaps in data about crime in Africa. Such experimental approaches can help guide local police forces in identifying the most relevant factors contributing to crime, and thereby expand and professionalise policing operations.
• Police Accountability: A major contributor to crime in Africa is the dire state of accountability in Africa’s police forces. ICTs have the potential to upend this common scenario.Mobile telephony, data management software and applications, and widely available imaging technology permit new methods of capturing, aggregating, and disseminating evidence of police abuses, from petty bribery to human rights violations and systematic cover-ups and corruption. For example, there are multiple initiatives to identify and shame police corruption in Nigeria. The Stopthebribes! crowdsourcing initiative and Nigeria Police are online platforms that aggregate news and reports about policing in Nigeria and generate original reporting based on incidents reported by users. ICT-based civil society organisation can leverage technology to create greater accountability through transparency.

The report concludes that ineffective responses to crime in Africa sow public fear and distrust, undermine economic development, and bleed state institutions of their legitimacy. This, in turn, fosters a culture of impunity. While ICTs are not a panacea, if used properly and with sufficient community engagement, information technologies can harness greater efficiencies. Rather than building large, bureaucratic institutional structures, ICTs empower communities to watch out for themselves. It also gives communities potent tools to monitor police behaviour, and when needed bring misconduct to public attention. In this way, ICTs can incentivise proper police conduct.