Community-Based Crime Surveillance Network

This chapter presents a novel, interdisciplinary framework that reimagines public safety through a decentralized, community-driven crime surveillance network. By integrating citizen-operated drones, blockchain infrastructure, and decentralized data storage, the model empowers communities to actively contribute to crime prevention while ensuring transparency, accountability, and legal admissibility of surveillance data. The objective is to design and analyze a layered, ethically grounded architecture that shifts the locus of control from state-centric to participatory governance, where citizens, law enforcement, and technology interact in a verifiable and privacy-conscious ecosystem. The chapter analyses key architectural, operational, and ethical requirements and suggests a technically feasible model for deploying a scalable and legally compliant surveillance system that fosters trust in real-world setups.