Social media and community-oriented policing: examining the organizational image construction of municipal police on Twitter and Facebook

Abstract

ABSTRACT Municipal police departments across the United States are under pressure to strengthen relationships with the communities they serve, reinvigorating a discussion about enhancing the community orientation of the police. Social media is recommended as one way to improve community relationships, but is the social media content posted by police departments community-oriented? Is that the type of content they wish to project? By integrating organizational image construction from communication studies with the study of policing, this research compares what municipal police departments intend to convey on social media with the content that they post. Managers of social media accounts emphasized the value of providing transparency and humanizing officers while social media content reveals efforts to delicately balance crime-fighting and community-oriented identities. This balance varies by agency size, jurisdiction, and platform, suggesting that the pressures governing image-making activities must be further examined in local context.