Municipal Police Departments on Facebook: What Are They Posting and Are People Engaging?

Abstract

Municipal police departments are leveraging social media platforms to support their missions. In this paper, we understand what they post on Facebook daily, and people's engagement with these government agencies on the social media platform. First, we collected and manually annotated 6,825 posts sent by four agencies (i.e., NYPD, LAPD, Baltimore PD and Cleveland PD) in 2014. We developed a two-tier code scheme to identify the purpose of a post and its topic. We then analyzed user engagement (e.g., likes, shares, and comments) with different post types (i.e., photo, video, status, and link) and topics (e.g., crime, traffic etc.). We identified interesting patterns of user engagement, and further validated the major findings by classifying and examining 33,103 posts sent by 52 large municipal police departments in 2015. Our results provide practical insights for police administrators and community members who are working on community policing frameworks.