“We Are More Than Crime Fighters”: Social Media Images of Police Departments

• Author: Kourtnie Rodgers,Nicholas P. Lovrich,Xiaochen Hu
• DOI: 10.1177/1098611118783991
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

“We Are More Than

Crime Fighters”: Social

Media Images of Police

Departments

Xiaochen Hu

1

, Kourtnie Rodgers

2

,

and Nicholas P. Lovrich

3

Abstract

Currently, about 96% of U.S. police departments have adopted social media, nearly

94% of which have implemented Facebook. Unfortunately, researchers have not paid

much attention to police use of social media. The study serving as the basis for this

article entails a careful analysis of 14 of the most popular police Facebook pages and

analyzes posts during a 1-year period. The study documents 5 major themes and 24

noteworthy subthemes, and then applies a two-step cluster analysis to identify four

principal types of police Facebook social images: crime fighter, traditional cop, public

relations facilitator, and mixer. The well-established diffusion of innovations literature

is employed to provide justification for the timeliness of the study, and the work of

Rogers and subsequent scholars building upon it serves as the principal theoretical

framework for this study. Public policy implications for policing are discussed, along

with appropriate directions for further research.

Keywords

police, Facebook, typology, mixed methods analysis, diffusion of innovations

1

Department of Criminal Justice, Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, NC, USA

2

School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

3

School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Xiaochen Hu, Department of Criminal Justice, Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, NC, USA.

Email: xhu@uncfsu.edu

Police Quarterly

2018, Vol. 21(4) 544–572

!The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1098611118783991

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Introduction

Social media use by police departments is now widespread in the United States

(Lieberman, Koetzle, & Sakiyama, 2013). The International Association of

Chiefs of Police (IACP) created the IACP Center for Social Media in October

2010 to help police departments make effective use of social media by providing

multiple resources, tools, and a compilation of applicable research via their

official website (http://www.iacpsocialmedia.org/). The IACP has conducted

surveys focused on police use of social media annually since 2010. The organi-

zation sends these surveys electronically to law enforcement executives across

the United States (IACP Center for Social Media, 2010). Currently, about 96%

of municipal, county, and state police departments in the United States have

adopted social media (IACP, 2015). About 94% of U.S. law enforcement agen-

cies have implemented Facebook (IACP, 2015).

Founded in 2004, FacebookV

Rhas become one of the largest social networking

sites in the world. As of June 30, 2015, the organization reported there are 1.49

billion monthly active users and 1.31 billion monthly mobile active users

(Company Info, 2015). Facebook allows users to do a variety of social media

activities, including but not limited to chatting, messaging, making voice calls,

making video calls, uploading photos and videos, making comments, following

the activities and posts of others, reacting to posts with a single click, hyper-

linking other websites, and live streaming. Facebook has been studied by mul-

tiple social science disciplines including psychology (e.g., Rae, Lonborg,

Steward, & Turel, 2015; Roche, Jenkins, Aguerrevere, Kietlinski, & Prichard,

2015), sociology (e.g., Mai, Freudenthaler, Schneider, & Vorderer, 2015;

Pribeanu, Balog, Lamanauskas, & Slekiene, 2015), education (e.g.,

Androutsopoulos, 2015; Miron & Ravid, 2015), and political science (e.g.,

Miller, Bobkowski, Maliniak, & Rapoport, 2015; Sveningsson, 2014).

In the field of criminal justice, however, academic researchers have paid very

little attention to police use of social media. A number of scholars have reported

on the results of content analyses of police agencies’ social media posts (see

Crump, 2011; Heverin & Zach, 2010; Lieberman et al., 2013; Procter, Crump,

Karstedt, Voss, & Cantijoch, 2013). While these pioneering studies have pro-

vided vital descriptive information as is required for foundational groundwork,

they are somewhat lacking in the area of theory-informed analytical information

and broader conceptualization of social dynamics. The current study involves 14

police departments in the United States based on the most Facebook “likes”

received and applies a grounded theory approach to analyze 7,153 police

Facebook posts using a two-step cluster analysis to explore police departments’

practices in the design and placement of Facebook posts. The well-established

theory of diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2003) is employed to provide justi-

fication for the timeliness and areas of focus of the study, and it serves as the

principal theoretical framework as well for understanding how the innovation

Hu et al. 545