Citizen engagement to reduce crime: empowering 2,500 neighborhood leaders

The Singapore Police Force and the People's Association were watching two lines move in opposite directions: citizen involvement and participation were falling while crime rose. Their answer was a nationwide citizen-engagement campaign.

That answer carried its own problem. Several agencies that had never cooperated on a national issue would have to act as a single intra-governmental team for it to work at all.

We spent eighteen months designing the program alongside the police force and the People's Association, facilitating cross-functional meetings between agencies until they reached a shared vision, pooled their resources, and agreed on a design. That facilitation was the pivotal work — the initiative could not succeed while the agencies operated separately. Ground had already been laid in earlier engagements: leadership sessions for police force leaders, and an off-site retreat for People's Association directors.

Then the rollout. In forty-five days we trained more than 2,500 neighborhood facilitators in sessions of two and a half days, teaching them to work with citizen groups to recognize and reduce neighborhood crime, to convene constituents, to run meetings, and to motivate local leaders to work hand in hand with the police force and the People's Association.

We built culturally specific leadership tools for the campaign, including a Mandarin edition of every material, which put the learning to work faster on the ground.

More than 2,500 grassroots leaders took concrete action in their own neighborhoods. Officers and citizens formed citizen action teams and ran regional and local interventions — the campaign had been designed from the start to work at national scale.

Citizen involvement rose across the board.