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Twitter for city police department information sharing

Published: 22 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the use of Twitter by city police departments in large U.S. cities (cities with populations greater than 300,000). The purpose of our study is to determine what types of information are shared by city police departments over Twitter and to determine how the public uses the information shared to converse with the police departments and with each other. We read and analyzed 4,915 posts authored by 30 city police departments that have active Twitter accounts. The analysis shows that city police departments in large U.S. cities primarily use Twitter to disseminate crime and incident related information. City police departments also use Twitter to share information about their departments, events, traffic, safety awareness, and crime prevention. To a lesser extent, city police departments use Twitter to converse directly with the public and news media. We also sampled four weeks of public-authored tweets, totaling 1,984 tweets, that contained police department Twitter usernames and found that a majority of these tweets were retweets of police authored tweets; public-authored tweets also mentioned police departments in discussions or were used to send direct messages. This paper furthers our understanding of information sharing by city police departments as well as public redistribution of this information through the use of social media tools.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Location extraction from Traffic Event-related TextProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Computer, Control, Informatics and Its Applications10.1145/3575882.3575946(331-335)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2022
  • (2019)Social Media Communication of Public Sector OrganizationsProceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research10.1145/3325112.3325253(248-253)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
  • (2018)Examining conversations between police agencies and the public on FacebookProceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age10.1145/3209281.3209371(1-10)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
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Published In

cover image DL Hosted proceedings
ASIS&T '10: Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
October 2010
824 pages

Publisher

American Society for Information Science

United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2010

Author Tags

  1. Twitter
  2. communication patterns
  3. content analysis
  4. law enforcement
  5. microblogging
  6. social media
  7. user generated content

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  • Research-article

Conference

ASIS&T '10
ASIS&T '10: Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem
October 22 - 27, 2010
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh

Acceptance Rates

ASIS&T '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 52 of 149 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 135 of 277 submissions, 49%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Location extraction from Traffic Event-related TextProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Computer, Control, Informatics and Its Applications10.1145/3575882.3575946(331-335)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2022
  • (2019)Social Media Communication of Public Sector OrganizationsProceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research10.1145/3325112.3325253(248-253)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
  • (2018)Examining conversations between police agencies and the public on FacebookProceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age10.1145/3209281.3209371(1-10)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
  • (2017)Sentiment based Analysis of Tweets during the US Presidential ElectionsProceedings of the 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research10.1145/3085228.3085285(1-10)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2017
  • (2017)Call for ServiceProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998292(336-352)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
  • (2016)Social media for safetyProceedings of the 30th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference: Fusion!10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.29(1-12)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2016
  • (2016)Municipal Police Departments on FacebookProceedings of the 17th International Digital Government Research Conference on Digital Government Research10.1145/2912160.2912189(366-374)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2016
  • (2015)Social networks for police and residents in IndiaProceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research10.1145/2757401.2757420(256-265)Online publication date: 27-May-2015
  • (2015)Combining Automatic and Manual ApproachesProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2740908.2742125(1239-1244)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
  • (2011)Tweeting disasterProceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/2038476.2038522(235-240)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2011

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