Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

ABSTRACT

Police agencies have adopted social media quite widely, but researchers have paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon.  To date few studies have explored public reaction to police use of social media. The current study uses a purposive sample with 7,116 police Facebook posts collected from 14 different police agencies during a one-year period to answer two principal research questions: (1) with respect to the number of likes, number of shares, or number of comments regarding different themes present in police Facebook posts, are there differences among police agencies corresponding to differences in the thematic content in their postings? and (2) What factors are related to the public reaction (i.e., likes, shares, comments) to a police Facebook post? The findings from ANOVA and negative binomial regression models clearly indicate that citizens do have definite preferences on police Facebook posts – they are more likely to like and make comments on posts of police personnel and police-public relations, but less likely to share posts of Social Networking Sites. Also, they are more prone to like posts with narratives and pictures, but less likely to favor posts containing hyperlinks. Policy implications and practice guidelines, study limitations, and future research are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Public preferences
• police use of social media
• facebook
• quantitative analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The current study can only infer use of a posting if a post received ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’ and ‘comments.’ Under some circumstances the Facebook user saw the post but did not click ‘like’ or take any further action. The current study was unable to measure this part of social media effectiveness.

2. Initial data coding done by applying a grounded theory approach found that, compared to the other 14 police departments, the Brimfield Police Department (BPD) had a unique overall theme. Regarding primary content, besides crimes and criminals, tips, police-public relations, personnel, and social network sites, BPD also had a unique category labeled ‘open letter’ which constituted 31.6% of total postings. An open letter post usually included several parts such as greeting, weather report, historical events which happened on the same date, the tip of the day, birthday wishes, and a noteworthy quote. Regarding the use of language, the BPD also used different ways of communication such as treating the department Facebook page as a personal Facebook page and using slang terms (e.g., calling page followers crazy cousins). Accordingly, this agency was excluded in further analyses. We will conduct a case study on the Facebook posts posted by BPD as a separate study.

3. There are many factors that may influence why people ‘like,’ ‘share,’ or ‘comment’ on a Facebook post. For example, they may share the post if they dislike it just because they want more people to dislike it. They may make negative comments on a Facebook post. However, it is almost impossible to tell among those ‘likes,’ how many of them are true ‘likes.’ Therefore, we treat the current study as a macro-level analysis of public preferences on police Facebook posts. Although this is one of the limitations of the current study, the number of ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’ and ‘comments’ still indicate how these Facebook posts get attention by the public, whether it is positive or negative.

4. Among 37 posts identified as outliers, 7 posts belong to crimes and criminals; 2 posts belong to tips; 20 posts belong to police-public relations; 7 posts belong to personnel; and 1 belongs to social network sites.

5. There are also 24 subthemes under these 5 major themes. However, including all 24 subthemes into regression analysis would cause potential issues such as lack of sufficient cases. Therefore, we only analyze 5 major themes in the current study.

6. This argument was made based on the content of the police Facebook posts in the current data. The current study did not examine other forms of police-public interaction on the Facebook such as replying to Facebook users’ comments by the police.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaochen Hu

Xiaochen Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Fayetteville State University. He received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State University. He conducts both quantitative and qualitative studies related to police decision making, police culture, community-oriented policing, gangs, and criminal justice and mass media.

Kourtnie Rodgers

Kourtnie Rodgers is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. She obtained her M.A. in criminal justice from Boise State University, and prior to that earned a B.A. degree in criminal justice from University of Wyoming. Her current research interests lie in the areas of innovation in police organizations and the use of advanced technology in policing.

Nicholas P. Lovrich

Nicholas P. Lovrich is a Regents Professor Emeritus and Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington State University. He is a graduate of Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C.L.A. He has worked with federal, state, tribal, campus, county and municipal law enforcement agencies on applications of community policing concepts in carrying out the missions of those agencies over the course of the past three decades.