Mobile application to improve citizen reporting of urban security incidents in Trujillo

Abstract

This article aimed to determine the impact of a mobile application on optimizing citizen reporting of urban security incidents in Trujillo, Peru. Citizen insecurity represented a critical problem in the La Libertad region, where traditional reporting channels suffered from accessibility and trust limitations, resulting in a 75% underreporting rate. To address this issue, Harkai, a mobile application implemented with Flutter, Firebase, and a chatbot assistant called Harkbot, was developed. The methodology was applied, with a pre-experimental pre-test/post-test design using a single group. Two hundred participants were evaluated over six months using indicators such as the number of citizen reports, the number of criminal incidents, the level of perceived accessibility, and the level of citizen trust. The results, validated using Student's t-test (α=0.05), showed a 251.21% increase in citizen reports, a 17.96% reduction in crime incidents, a 92.49% improvement in perceived accessibility, and a 118.27% increase in citizen trust. It was concluded that Harkai significantly optimized citizen reporting of urban security incidents in Trujillo.