Law Enforcement and the Depiction of Minorities and Women on Social Media: A Review of Municipal Police Department Facebook Pictures

Abstract

There is a growing area of research today focusing on how the demographics of law enforcement officers and criminals are depicted. This research has concentrated on portrayals by the media, popular culture, criminal justice textbooks, training manuals, and other literature surrounding criminal justice. There is little known, however, about the way the race and gender of police and criminals are represented on social media. This study attempts to fill this void by examining police Facebook pages in the 171 largest cities in the United States. Specifically, 20,152 images of police and criminals on these police Facebook pages are examined to determine whether there are disparities in representation based on race, gender, and other variables. We found that female and minority officers are appropriately represented in the images of police on Facebook pages in relation to their actual representation in the field. In contrast, images of criminals tend to be disproportionately composed of Black males. Implications for the recruitment of minority officers and other relevant issues are discussed.