Balance Your Bobbies

The Police in North Wales have come up with a fantastic way to involve local residents in prioritising neighbourhood policing resources - called Balance Your Bobbies. On the website, local residents can download their local area crime report, and then they're also invited to decide how much time the police should dedicate to solving crimes accross a range of different crime types. The clever part is that all users then have to decide where to put the resources - it's just not possible for your Bobbies to prioritise everything. When you've made your tough choices on where resources should go in your neighbourhood, it aggregates your response with everyone elses - so everyone gets to see what the consensus is. 

This is good for lots of reasons. First, it gives the local Police force meaningful feedback from local residents - although we don't think for a minute that this should replace traditional face to face community cops. Secondly though, it provides a graphic demonstration to everyone that it really is a tough job making those spending and resource decisions. Thanks to Podnosh - we've found a video interview with the chap responsible for setting it up, who explains a bit more about it. 

We're flagging this up because we think it's a good idea,  and one that could be extended to all sorts of other public services. We've got no idea whether Lothian and Borders Police would consider doing anything similar to this themselves. So, in the meantime - we're eagerly awaiting the launch of Glasgow based, My Police, which is another on-line Feedback tool that aims to help the Police to work with local residents better. There's more about the thinking behind My Police in this radio interview with one of the founders, below:

MyPolice is interviewed for the radio from Lauren Currie on Vimeo.

Greener Leith is hoping that My Police will choose Leith to be one of the earlier pilot neighbourhoods that help in the development of My Police, so Leithers might get amongst the first people to try it out.