Leveraging social media to achieve a community policing agenda |
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| Institution: | 1. Bentley University, United States;2. Virginia Tech, United States;3. Bryant University, United States;4. The Culverhouse College of Commerce, University of Alabama, United States;1. Center for Technology in Government, SUNY Albany, 187 Wolf Rd., Suite 301, Albany, NY 12205, United States;2. Institute of Public Administration, Information Technology Sector, P O Box 205, Riyadh 11141, Saudi Arabia;1. Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA;2. California State University Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA, USA;3. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA;4. Washington State University, Vancouver, WA, USA;5. Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA;1. Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA;2. Department of Public Administration & Policy, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA;3. Rockefeller Institute of Government, Albany, NY, USA;4. Department of Information Science, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA;5. Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Mexico;1. Information Systems Group, Business School, University of Colorado Denver, United States;2. Department of Management, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Bangalore 560035, Karnataka, India;3. Department of Information Systems Decision Sciences, Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, FL, United States;4. Department of ISCS, COB, University of Texas at San Antonio, TX, United States;1. Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark;2. Lab for Digital and Mobile Governance, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China;1. School of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia;2. Department of Public Administration, The University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. César E. Chávez Boulevard, San Antonio, TX 78207-4415, USA |
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| Abstract: | This research investigates the communication behavior and engagement strategies in the bilateral use of social media between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve. It advances existing work by studying municipal level government actors in a new communications environment where social media now play an important part. Grounded in agenda setting theory, our analysis identifies police departments' social media issue priorities, analyzes the responses of their audiences to those communications, and directly compares followers' own conversation priorities with the police agenda. Our data set includes all the content from the Facebook and Twitter accounts of five similarly sized and demographically situated police departments in the U.S., plus all the tweets and posts from the followers or friends responding to those accounts over a 90-day period. We performed both manual coding and machine cluster analysis to elicit major threads of conversation. In addition to the data analytics, we conducted interviews with the five police departments to understand the similarities and differences in agenda priorities resulting from their social media goals and use.The study shows the priorities that comprise the police agenda, identifies both similarities and differences in what their audiences communicate among themselves about most frequently in the public safety domain relative to the police agenda, and finds evidence of positive response from the public to some of the agenda priorities communicated by the police. Our data also reveal that police are using social media interactively, which could, over time, advance community policing goals. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for law enforcement and community policing and suggests directions for future research on agenda setting in this new media environment. |
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