Examining conversations between police agencies and the public on Facebook

Abstract

Social media has emerged to be a new platform for facilitating collaboration between police agencies and the public. However, police agencies still fall short in determining the tactics and strategies to interact with the public in an effective manner. Our work focuses on analyzing conversations between police agencies and the public on Facebook. More specifically, we studied the contents of the agencies' posts, how the public commented on these posts, and further, how agencies responded to the public's comments. We generated code-schemes for categorizing the public's comments and the replies of police agencies to them. We further conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses to understand patterns of their conversations on Facebook. Our findings suggest several practical implications for police agencies to improve their services via social media.