By Reka Solymosi, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow. This October I attended Crime and fear in public places: Patterns, challenges and actions, an event exploring the topic of safety in public places, with a particular focus on technological developments that have evolved this area of policy and research. In this blog post, I summarise some of the interesting things I learned at the event, but also highlight how the development of the tools was not much of a focus of the conference.