REPHRAIN Safer Streets

Online spaces play a considerable role in inciting, increasing, normalising and organising street crime. Violent online narratives and hate speech translate to knife crime and anti-social behaviour facilitated by online procurement of weapons or coordination of organised violence. Misogynistic online behaviours, cyberstalking, image-based abuse and intimate partner surveillance technologies have a direct consequence offline for VAWG. Online interactions shape offline behaviours and vice versa.

The REPHRAIN Safer Streets research programme will focus on the intersection of online and offline behaviours with the aim to develop and pilot new capabiities for detection, tracking and prediction of the locations where crime concentrates. Online interactions shape offline behaviours, actions on the streets and within communities, and vice versa. 

The project will address this through interdisciplinary research and working collaboratively with local communities where street crime is a major challenge; with third sector organisations who aim to support victims/survivors; and local law enforcement. 

The primary research will be conducted through three interlinked strands: 

1. Understanding crime-related issues locally and potential for targeted prevention. 
2. Using online data to support local policing efforts. 
3. Linking digital data to individual and group characteristics for prediction. 

This will result in new datasets as well as a map of data gaps, prevention, awareness and education mechanisms and their limitations, as well as prototype community-level mechanisms, AI-based analytic tools and dashboards. Rapid pilots will be used to evaluate the drivers and barriers to scaling these up in other locations resulting in a blueprint for scalable, evidence-based integrated data systems for linking online harms and street crime. 

REHPRAIN Safer Streets is a collaborative project led by the University of Bristol with the University of Bath and CENTRIC as partners.