Communicating with purpose: Image work, social media, and policing
| Author | Huda Zaidi,Christopher D. O’Connor |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X20932957 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2021, Vol. 94(3) 333 –352
Article
Communicating with
purpose: Image work,
social media, and policing
Christopher D. O’Connor
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute
of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Huda Zaidi
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute
of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
Police services have substantially increased their use of social media in everyday police
work. Few researchers have directly asked police services about the purpose their social
media accounts serve. Through in-depth interviews conducted with police personnel
overseeing police services’ social media sites in Canada, this article examines the reasons
provided by police services for creating and operating their social media sites. We argue
that the police utilize social media to communicate an image of police that demonstrates
effectiveness and an openness to engaging with the public. We also explore the chal-
lenges that come with this type of image work.
Keywords
Image work, policing, police communication, social media
Introduction
While new technologies are often readily adopted by the police (Nunn, 2001), there is a
surprising lack of research systematically examining the impact that introducing new
technologies has on police practice (Koper et al., 2014). Nevertheless, technology has
Corresponding author:
Christopher D. O’Connor, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario
Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4, Canada.
Email: Christopher.O’Connor@uoit.ca
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X20932957
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334 The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 94(3)
indeed substantially shaped contemporary policing. For example, the 911 emergency
system, patrol vehicles, and having computer terminals in vehicles have all helped to
alter the way policing is delivered to communities (Chan, 2001, Ericson and Haggerty,
1997, Kennedy and Gibbs Van Brunschot, 2009, Manning, 1992). Interestingly, despite
the expectation from the public and the police themselves that adopting new technolo-
gies enhances police productivity and accountability, it is still unclear whether these
technologies make the police more effective (Brown and Brudney, 2003, Chan, 2001,
Koper et al., 2014).
Social media is one of the latest technologies to be rapidly adopted by police. Social
media sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) have revolutionized the way we com-
municate by providing anyone with access to the internet an avenue to voice opinions
and communicate directly with anyone else using these platforms. Given that much of
the role of the police in contemporary times involves communicating and building
relationships with the public (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997), it makes sense that the police
would see utility in using social media. Since social media sites only became widely used
in the middle to late 2000s, the use of social media sites by the police and research
pertaining to this topic is relatively new. Much of the research completed thus far has
been case studies of particular events and/or individual police services. For example,
research has examined the police use of social media during riots (Procter et al., 2013,
Trottier, 2012), protests (Earl et al., 2013), and terrorist attacks (Davis et al., 2014). Thus,
research on police social media use has been highly contextual in that it tends to focus on
the unusual rather than the more mundane daily use of social media. This research has
also been mostly reliant on content analyses of police social media content. For example,
researchers have examined what the police present to the public via Twitter (O’Connor,
2017, Schneider, 2016b) and Facebook (Kelly, 2014, Lieberman et al., 2013). While
there is beginning to emerge a noteworthy amount of research on how the police utilize
their social media accounts (Walsh and O’Connor, 2019), less is known about the
reasons why they operate these accounts.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the reasoning given by a range of
police services in Canada as to the purpose of operating their social media sites. We were
particularly interested in the public social media accounts operated by police services
(i.e., the official social media accounts associated with the police service) as opposed to
the accounts of individual officers or clandestine accounts used in police investigations.
Therefore, this article adds to the limited literature (e.g., Bullock, 2018a) that has begun
to examine police services’ perspectives on their social media use across a range of
police services. More specifically, the resear ch questions guiding our research were
‘what do police services personnel operating police services’ official public social media
accounts perceive to be the purpose of these accounts?’ and ‘are there challenges to
achieving said purposes?’. We argue that based on the findings from our study, the
reasons why police services operate social media accounts are best explained through
a lens of image work. Police services work to craft an image that portrays them as
effective and an engaged and communicative community partner. However, maintaining
this image through social media is challenging due to a lack of resources. Therefore, we
begin by broadly examining the literature on image work in policing before turning more
specifically to its use in social media.
2The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles XX(X)
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