College of Arts & Sciences

Emily Greberman

College of Arts & Sciences

Criminology & Justice Studies, Psychology

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Robert Kane

Criminology & Justice Studies

Twitter: Filling a Gap, or Digging a Hole between Police Departments and their Residents?

This research examines how the 25 largest municipal and county police departments (PDs) in the US use their Twitter accounts to communicate and share content with residents of their jurisdictions. For each department we collected “Tweets” over the prior 30 days from a given reference date and coded them into message categories based on an iterative process. Our primary purposes were to identify (1) the most common types of information PDs broadcast to their publics, and (2) how departments interacted with people who posted to their accounts. We treated text strings, photos, and videos as distinct message media, and coded them based on message type. The average PD posted 117.38 (SD=87.76) tweets during the study month. We found that when PDs tweeted information related to current community safety issues, residents often tweeted back replies that were favorable to the agency. When departments tweeted out more “humanizing” messages, e.g., community events and/or pictures with kids, they tended to receive a higher number of positive comments as compared to other message types. Current news scandals, however, led to negative posts by residents, regardless of what departments tweeted. The research reports several additional findings.