Examining Twitter Mentions Between Police Agencies and Public Users through the Lens of Stakeholder Theory

Abstract

Police agencies increasingly leverage social media for community policing. This paper examines how municipal police agencies and public users interact on social media by examining their mentioning behaviors on Twitter. We manually annotated 7,142 tweets sent by 14 municipal police agencies within 6 months in 2015, and classified 15,785 tweets where public users mentioned the agencies. Through the lens of Stakeholder Theory, we also classified 10,956 Twitter users, who either mentioned the agencies or were mentioned by the agencies, into different stakeholder groups. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we identified patterns of how they mentioned each other. For example, agencies mentioned more popular and local stakeholders, while less popular and non-local stakeholders sent more negative tweets. We discuss implications of the results for police agencies, which include how to better identify and engage stakeholders and foster community policing on Twitter.