Municipal police departments on Facebook: What are they posting and are people engaging?

Yun Huang, Sen Huo, Yaxing Yao, Niu Chao, Yang Wang, Jennifer Grygiel, Steven B Sawyer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Municipal police departments are leveraging social media platforms to support their missions. In this paper, we understand what they post on Facebook daily, and people's engagement with these government agencies on the social media platform. First, we collected and manually annotated 6,825 posts sent by four agencies (i.e., NYPD, LAPD, Baltimore PD and Cleveland PD) in 2014. We developed a two-Tier code scheme to identify the purpose of a post and its topic. We then analyzed user engagement (e.g., likes, shares, and comments) with different post types (i.e., photo, video, status, and link) and topics (e.g., crime, traffic etc.). We identified interesting patterns of user engagement, and further validated the major findings by classifying and examining 33,103 posts sent by 52 large municipal police departments in 2015. Our results provide practical insights for police administrators and community members who are working on community policing frameworks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationdg.o 2016 - Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research - Internet Plus Government: New Opportunities to Solve Public Problems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages366-374
Number of pages9
Volume08-10-June-2016
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343398
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 8 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, dg.o 2016 - Shanghai, China
Duration: Jun 8 2016Jun 10 2016

Other

Other17th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, dg.o 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period6/8/166/10/16

Keywords

  • Community Policing
  • E-Government
  • Facebook
  • Law Enforcement Agencies
  • Police Department
  • Public Safety
  • Social Media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Software

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