Community Engagement
Long Beach’s Smart City Initiative is driven by residents and visitors. The things we love most about Long Beach – our beaches, diverse neighborhoods, colleges, and parks – are made up of people, not technology.From Day 1, we listened to Long Beach community members and local stakeholders to inform the Smart City Strategy. We have held 13 community meetings, in addition to workshops, interviews, and online outreach – engaging over 850 stakeholders to-date through our outreach efforts. Moreover, we use an equity lens and intentionally uplift the voices of community groups that represent individuals left behind by the digital divide. We also spoke with technology industry partners and City staff and launched a multi-lingual paper- and online survey (survey results available here).
We acknowledge that our outreach is not exhaustive and is limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the inequities associated with the digital divide. Many community groups that we reached out to let us know that they did not have the capacity to participate due to other priorities during the pandemic, however we are committed to continuing community engagement citywide at every step of this Initiative.
Throughout this process, TID collaborated closely with the following community groups:
Long Beach Gray Panthers; Downtown LB Residents; Long Beach Rotary Club; Downtown Associated Youth Services; Long Beach YMCA; Whaley Park Community Resource Fair; PopUPTown Social; Filipino Migrant Center; Khmer Girls in Action; Washington Neighborhood Association; Long Beach Forward
Community Sentiment on Public Safety Technology
When asked if public safety agencies should have access to personal information for crime and emergency prevention purposes, most respondents believed that law enforcement agencies should have access to personal data. The high percentage of those who completely disagreed with the practice highlights the general distrust of local government agencies. To read more about this survey please click here.| Q.10 In some smart cities, law enforcement agencies may use personal data collected via the internet, smartphone apps, or social media activity, along with publicly available incident data, to predict future behaviors and take action to prevent crime or emergencies. The use of my personal information by public safety agencies for crime and emergency prevention: | |
| What Residents Resonated With Most |
Percentage |
| Unsure | 9.09% |
| Should be prohibited | 31.82% |
| Should be permitted only if I can control how data are used | 36.36% |
| Should automatically be permitted | 22.73% |
Lastly, our conversations with the community led us to find the following fruitful comments:
| "We have big concerns and mistrust about sharing data with law enforcement or with ICE..." |
| "The City should be very, very careful about how they collect and share the ppersonal information of its residents." |
| "As we move towards the planning and executing becoming a smart city, it's very important that the city leadership has transparency and communicates clearly and openly with the residents of Long Beach." |
| "This general distrust of agencies makes it hard...If technology will help make the world cleaner, safer, better, more efficient, we should move forward with it. But none of us trust our leaders." |
| "Who will have access to the data collected? Who will be the owners of the data collected? There is a lot of apprehension and mistrust of local government." |
Photos of Past Community Engagement Events
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