Examining Police Agencies’ Dialogic Accounting Practices in Facebook Conversations

Abstract

Police agencies have been posting regularly on Facebook and trying to use this social media platform for building community policing. However, little is known about how the public comments to police agencies’ posts and how the agencies further reply to public comments on Facebook. Addressing these questions helps us understand police agencies’ practices of using Facebook for supporting dialogic accounting, i.e., responding to multiple viewpoints, on this social media platform. In this work, we collected 29,928 Facebook posts of 43 municipal police agencies in the U.S. and 628,098 public comments to those agencies’ posts, as well as all replies to the public comments (including replies from other public users and the agencies). We find that the agencies only replied to 907 (0.1%) public comments. Our findings show that (1) the public’s comments varied in diverse topics, but the agencies mainly replied to those comments that were Seeking information; (2) the agencies replied quickly when Acknowledging positive public comments; and (3) the agencies often ignored negative comments. We also discuss design implications for social media platforms to support better dialogic accounting practices.