@Houstonpolice: an exploratory case of Twitter during Hurricane Harvey
| Date | 11 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-09-2018-0279 |
| Pages | 1334-1351 |
| Published date | 11 November 2019 |
| Author | Seungwon Yang,Brenton Stewart |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
@Houstonpolice: an
exploratory case of Twitter
during Hurricane Harvey
Seungwon Yang
School of Library and Information Science, Center for Computation and Technology,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, and
Brenton Stewart
School of Library and Information Science,
College of Human Sciences and Education,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public
engagement efforts using Twitter during Hurricane Harvey, which was a large-scale urban crisis event.
Design/methodology/approach –This study harvested a corpus of over 13,000 tweets using Twitter’s
streaming API, across three phases of the Hurricane Harvey event: preparedness, response and recovery.
Both text and social network analysis (SNA) techniques were employed including word clouds, n-gram
analysis and eigenvector centrality to analyze data.
Findings –Findings indicate that departmental tweets coalesced around topics of protocol, reassurance
and community resilience. Twitter accounts of governmental agencies, such as regional police
departments, local fire departments, municipal offices, and the personal accounts of city’spoliceandfire
chiefs were the most influential actors during the period under review, and Twitter was leveraged as de
facto a 9-1-1 dispatch.
Practical implications –Emergency management agencies should consider adopting a three-phase
strategy to improve communication and narrowcast specific types of information corresponding to relevant
periods of a crisis episode.
Originality/value –Previous studies on police agencies and social media have largely overlooked discrete
periods, or phases, in crisis events. To address this gap, the current study leveraged text and SNA to
investigate Twitter communications between HPD and the public. This analysis advances understanding of
information flows on law enforcement social media networks during crisis and emergency events.
Keywords Social network analysis, Crisis information, Twitter, Policing, Text analysis, Citizen interaction
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
On Saturday, August 26, 2017, Hurricane Harvey descended upon Houston, Texas, the
fourth largest city in the USA. Days of record setting rain resulted in over 50 deaths in the
metropolitan area, thousands were stranded with one third of the city underwater and
billions of dollars in damage. While local officials reported that over 56,000 cases of 9-1-1
calls were made, citizens also turned to social media for asking rescues and help (Rhodan,
2017). While steadily growing, not enough work has focused on how police departments
(PD) leverage social media to communicate with the public during times of crisis in
emergency or mass convergence events. We seek to expand this burgeoning area of
research adopting a framework of crisis informatics to situate our analysis. Crisis
informatics is simultaneously an interdisciplinary field of study, and a framework for
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 7, 2019
pp. 1334-1351
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-09-2018-0279
Received 25 September 2018
Revised 9 May 2019
Accepted 12 June 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The authors share co-first authorship. This study was supported in part from Seungwon Yang’s
National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1620451 and Brenton Stewart’s Russell Long
Professorship in the School of Library & Information Science, Louisiana State University.
1334
OIR
43,7
viewing contemporary crisis and mass emergency events. Hagar (2006) broadly defined
crisis informatics as a field that examines “the interconnectedness of people, organizations,
information, and technology during crises”(p. 10). Crisis informatics also considers a full life
cycle of disaster events including the preparedness, response and recovery phases, which
influenced data collection and analysis in this study. We leverage crisis informatics as lens
to critically examine: how information production and dissemination evolves during the
phases of a crisis event, and an information environment when traditional “technology
infrastructure breaks down”(Hagar, 2006).
In this paper, we investigate the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public engagement
on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey by applying the framework of crisis informatics. We
address four fundamental questions:
RQ1. What types of informational content was shared between HPD and the public?
RQ2. What social network patterns evolved within @Houstonpolice network?
RQ3. Was the formation of clusters in the @Houstonpolice network observed? If so,
what were the main topical interests in those clusters?
RQ4. Did @Houstonpolice serve as an alternative 9-1-1 emergency dispatch?
The HPD is one of the largest police agencies in the USA, with over 5,000 sworn officers,
and patrols a jurisdiction of over 2m citizens and an area of 601.7 square miles
(1,560 km
2
). The department launched its Twitter account in 2010, and maintains an
active social media presence via a blog, YouTube channel, Facebook and Instagram
accounts. We present the literature review in the next section, followed by our
methodologies for collecting and analyzing data in the third section. The results of our
analysis are described in the fourth section. We further discuss results and summarize
our study in the fifth section.
Related studies
Policing and social media
The relationship between PD and media entities is nothing new. Law enforcement agencies
have long interacted with local and national media, particularly news outlets, to inform the
citizenry on a myriad of issues. Since 2009, this relationship has broadened to include social
media platforms, whose design has distinctive affordances such as the ability to share
“information in the form of visual, audio, and text, […] on demand […] by most anyone,
anywhere”(Schneider, 2016, p. 17). The integration of social media into contemporary
policing is in part related to a global open government movement in the West (Bertot et al.,
2012; Dadashzadeh, 2010; Ubaldi, 2013). Snead (2013) posits that the eGovernment
movement in the USA increased momentum in 2009 when the Obama administration’s Open
Government Initiative required federal agencies to distribute more information on the Web
and increase public participation in governance. Popular social media platforms such as
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were adopted as a strategy to connect digital denizens with
an emerging eGovernment. While several researchers have posited that information
communication technologies (ICTs) are an effective means for governmental agencies to
increase public trust by fostering a culture of “transparency”and “anti-corruption,”there is
still not enough of attention on how law enforcement agencies leverage ICTs, and their
resulting impact on local communities (Bertot et al., 2012, p. 265).
Most of the published research on policing and ICTs emanates from the disciplines of
public administration, political science and police science (Schneider, 2016). As such, we
have noticed that this burgeoning area of academic inquiry receives relatively little attention
in the information science discipline. Heverin and Zach (2010) examined the Twitter
1335
@Houstonpolice
To continue reading
Request your trial