Twitter for City Police Department Information Sharing

摘要

In this paper, we examine the use of Twitter by city policerndepartments in large U.S. cities (cities with populationsrngreater than 300,000). The purpose of our study is torndetermine what types of information are shared by city policerndepartments over Twitter and to determine how the publicrnuses the information shared to converse with the policerndepartments and with each other. We read and analyzedrn4,915 posts authored by 30 city police departments that havernactive Twitter accounts. The analysis shows that city policerndepartments in large U.S. cities primarily use Twitter torndisseminate crime and incident related information. Cityrnpolice departments also use Twitter to share informationrnabout their departments, events, traffic, safety awareness, andrncrime prevention. To a lesser extent, city police departmentsrnuse Twitter to converse directly with the public and newsrnmedia. We also sampled four weeks of public-authoredrntweets, totaling 1,984 tweets, that contained policerndepartment Twitter usernames and found that a majority ofrnthese tweets were retweets of police authored tweets; publicauthoredrntweets also mentioned police departments inrndiscussions or were used to send direct messages. This paperrnfurthers our understanding of information sharing by cityrnpolice departments as well as public redistribution of thisrninformation through the use of social media tools.