Building the Beloved Community: Designing Technologies for Neighborhood Safety

Neighborhood safety technologies, such as Nextdoor and Citizen, aim to enhance user safety through features like real-time alerts, interactive maps, and personalized feeds. While these platforms can support users' sense of safety, they can also fuel a local culture of policing and lateral surveillance, which disproportionately impacts racialized and unhoused members of the community. In contrast, the theory and practice of Transformative Justice was developed to ensure the safety of those populations who are constructed to be dangerous by society. We conducted a case study of a neighborhood social work program in Jackson Grove, Atlanta to understand the design implications of a Transformative Justice-oriented approach to neighborhood safety. Our findings highlight an opportunity for designers to reconceptualize safety from merely protecting users towards: 1) meeting the basic needs of a community, and 2) building relationships to support accountability. These shifts create an opportunity for designers to reimagine neighborhood safety technologies and the associated practices for users. We surface a new wave of safety research in HCI that aims to support both safety and justice and contribute key design priorities towards this work.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI .