Cybercrime and Digital Criminology: Lecture 10

COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

COMMUNICATING WITH THE PUBLIC

SOCIAL MEDIA LOGIC

INFORMATION GATHERING

NSW POLICE'S MEME STRATEGY

• Crump (2011): three models of police Twitter use aimed at fostering public engagement:

• 1) broadcasters:

• Police attempt to maximise their followers.

• 2) local knowledge gatherers:

• Police attempt to crowdsource information from a local following.

• 3) community facilitators:

• Police attempt to foster dense networks that provide them with comments, ideas and feedback on their performance and priorities.

• Kelling and Moore (2005): the current era of policing can be characterised as an “information era”.

• Citizen-police (Koskela, 2011) and crowdsourced surveillance (Trottier, 2014).

• Example: photo-identification of the Boston marathon offenders.

• There is, however, little control over the flow of information and significant errors can occur.

• ‘Not only has the Internet created a new space through which police organizations can now share information and communicate with their ‘stakeholders’, but it has also enabled a greater capacity for the police to respond to never-ending demands for information and content from the public and the media on issues of crime’

- Lee and McGovern (2013b: 124)

• Social media gives police departments greater control over the content of the messages they put out to the public.

• Secondly, as Leishman and Mason (2003: 41) note, social media allow police departments to control the context of their press releases.

• Thirdly, as a communications tool, social media offers police departments innovative and interactive strategies for engaging the public (Omanga, 2015).

• Social media “logic” based on four principles: programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).

• Programmability: capacity to dynamically alter the flow of network traffic, to preferentially visualise some types of information.

• Popularity: the organisation of information according to the level of use/influence of the information rather than by the nature of the content.

• Connectivity: the diffuse networked mechanisms through which content producers are sourced and organised.

• Datafication: the rapid rendering of user content and activity to large data sets amenable for analysis.

ASSESSMENT 2

QUIZ

Go to www.menti.com and use the code 55 64 36

WEEK 12 QUIZ

• Make sure your recommendations are specific.

• Read beyond the required and recommended readings.

• Because you have less time than anticipated, we will be more leniant when we mark your second assessment.

• Contact us for a consult if you want to discuss your approach to the second assessment.

Winner pockets a $50 Readings Voucher

PART 1:

CRIME BLOTTING

UNDERSTANDING POLICE

USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

NSW POLICE FACEBOOK ENGAGEMENT

• Lieberman et al. (2013: 454) found that departments primarily adopted broadcast and local knowledge gathering models of social media use, through using the platform to post information about local crimes.

• ‘Crime blotting’: reporting that a crime has recently occurred and enlisting the public to provide information (Lieberman et al., 2013).

• Benefits:

• Serves to assist the primary functions of policing.

• Comparatively low maintenance.

• Challenges:

• Tends not to foster a large following among members of the public (Denef et al., 2013).

• Tar less likely to engender a close relationship with the public.

WHAT ARE THE POLICE DOING

MEMES AS POLICE IMAGE-WORK?

ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

• In the United States, over 75% of the largest police departments have a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and/or MySpace – three of the largest social media sites (Lieberman et al., 2013).

• Law enforcement agencies use social media to notify the public of safety concerns (91%), community outreach and citizen engagement (89%), public relations and reputation management (86%), and to obtain information to use as evidence (59%).

• Australian police forces that have employed social media generally speak positively of their experiences using social media.

Monthly engagement rates of NSW Police’s Facebook page between May 2016 – May 2018 (Wood 2019).

• Image-work: strategies that attempt to increase public confidence and trust in an organization through manipulating its public image (Ericson 1982; Mawby 2002; McGovern and Lee 2010; Schneider 2016).

• ‘Copaganda’? - Shantz (2016)

• Presentational strategies that offer a ‘positive image’ of the force through citing key icons and symbols (Manning 1992; Bullock 2018).

EXPRESSIVE APPROACHES

OVERVIEW

PART 1: UNDERSTANDING WHAT THE POLICE ARE DOING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

PART 2: POLICY CONSIDERATIONS

HOW ARE THE POLICE USING

• Low quantity posting police departments tended to accord more with a community policing model.

• Providing members of the public with crime prevention tips and directions to services (Lieberman et al., 2013: 456).

• Benefits:

• Tends to increase the following of police social media accounts, and consequently, the reach of their messages.

• May also foster a greater tolerance for police mistakes.

• Challenges:

• High maintenance, requiring more monitoring and greater interaction with members of the public.

• Has the potential to polarize members of the public (Denef et al., 2013; McGovern, 2017).

SOCIAL MEDIA?

• Police operational strategies
• Police communication strategies
• Image-work
• Police legitimacy
• Policing’s meme strategy

• Government agency social media strategies
• Information gathering challenges
• Project Eyewatch
• Best practice: communication strategies
• Best practice: increasing social media engagement
• Best practice: digital storytelling and image work

• Twenty-six percent of agencies reported almost never or never used an informal tone (Urban Institute and IACP, 2017: 8).

• Thirty four percent of agencies do not respond to negative comments through social media (Urban Institute and IACP, 2017: 8).

• Sixty four percent have not identified specific goals to measure the success of their social media activity (Urban Institute and IACP, 2017: 8).

• Much of police social media use is undertaken by specialized and centralized public relations units (see Lee and McGovern, 2013a).

• With the advent of social media, police may be subject to more public scrutiny than ever before, as individuals are readily able to upload cameraphone footage of police indiscretions, such as excessive use of force.

• Cop Watch: increasing police accountability through citizen journalism is a testament to this (see Wilson and Serisier, 2010; Bock, 2016).

• Goldsmith (2010: 914) terms ‘policing’s new visibility’.

• When using social media off-duty, officers must, as Goldsmith (2015) notes, be mindful not only of what they post, but also who and what they associate with online.

DISGRACEBOOK POLICING

• Police social media managers might take into account the nature of online information diffusion on social media, and the implications this has for crafting online content.

• Humor can be used to great effect by police social media teams to generate online engagement and change the public image of policing (McGovern, 2017; see also Fraustino and Ma 2015).

'With changes to the algorithm, it was getting harder for them to get that content. It was designed originally as a strategy to better get the existing audience, but now it's not only engaged the existing audience and our engagement levels are through the roof, but we've got a new audience as well (np)'

- Strath Gordon (in Butler, 2017)

POLICING AND SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

The August 2011 Riots in England.

• Legitimacy encompasses a) trust in the police, b) a willingness to defer to the authority of the police, and c) the belief that the actions of the police are morally justified (Lee and McGovern 2013a).

• Social media represent an appealing vehicle for police to engage in image-work and shore up institutional legitimacy (Lee and McGovern 2013b; Kelly 2015).

• As the case of New South Wales Police illustrates, instrumental and expressive approaches to social media should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, or a zero-sum game.

• Ericson and Haggerty (1997): communicating risk and policing communications about risk are two key roles of the police.

• Through social media, police may provide real-time updates about not only crimes, but also other risks such as natural disasters (see Fowler, 2017).

• Crisis communication might also encompass general comments including links to images, praising the resilience of individuals and the community, and providing information on clean up events (Procter et al., 2013).

FIVE-MINUTE BREAK

CRISIS COMMUNICATION

POLICE LEGITIMACY

CRIM20002:

CRIM20002:

• Image-work: strategies that attempt to increase public confidence and trust in an organization through manipulating its public image, have long been a key dimension of police public relations (Ericson 1982; Mawby 2002; McGovern and Lee 2010; Schneider 2016).

• Police presentational strategies: “the predominant means by which the police present their mission, mandate, and actions to the public at large” (Manning 1997: 199).

• A broad literature acknowledges that public confidence can be enhanced by the police being an active, visible and accessible part of community life (Allan et al, 2016).

POLICE IMAGE-WORK

CYBERCRIME AND

CYBERCRIME AND

DIGITAL CRIMINOLOGY

LECTURE 10:

LECTURE 10:

POLICING AND

POLICING AND

Police-media relations

Andrejevic M (2009) Control over personal information in the database era. Surveillance & Society, 6 3: 322-326.

Jewkes Y (2015) Media and Crime. London, UK: SAGE.

Lee M and McGovern A (2013a) Force to sell: Policing the image and manufacturing public confidence. Policing & Society 23(2): 103-124.

Lee M and McGovern A (2013b) Policing and media: public relations, simulations and communications. London, UK: Routledge.

Leishman F and Mason P (2003) Policing and the Media: Facts, Fictions and Factions. London, UK: Willan.

McGovern A (2011) Tweeting the news: Criminal justice agencies and their use of social networking sites. ANZCCC: The Australian and New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference 2010. Pp.1-6.

McGovern A and Lee M (2010) ‘Cop[ying] it Sweet’: Police Media Units and the Making of News. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 43(3): 444-464.

Police presentational strategies

Au E (2013) Police on Facebook. NSW Police Force Magazine Police Monthly. Oct.10.

Manning PK (1997) Police work: the social organization of policing. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, p.119.

Meijer, A. J., and M. Thaens. 2013. Social Media Strategies: An Empirical Analysis of Emerging Social Media Strategies of North American Police Departments. Government Information Quarterly 30(4): 343–350.

Schneider CJ (2016) Police presentational strategies on Twitter in Canada. Policing and Society: An international journal of Research and Policy 26(2): 129-147.

Schneider CJ (2016) Policing and Social media: social control in an era of new media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Urban Institute and IACP (2017) 2016 Law Enforcement Use of Social Media Survey. A Joint Publication by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Urban Institute. Urban Institute, Washington DC .

http://www.theiacp.org/Portals/0/documents/pdfs/2016-law-enforcement-use-of-social-media-survey.pdf

[Last accessed 15-12-2017]

Police Media Engagement

Bock MA (2016) Film the Police! Cop‐Watching and Its Embodied Narratives. Journal of Communication 66(1): 13-34.

Brown G (2016) The blue line on thin ice: Police use of force modifications in the era of cameraphones and YouTube. British Journal of Criminology 56(2): 293-312.

Davenport TH and Beck JC (2001) The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, US: Harvard Business School Press.

Fernandez M, Cano AE and Alani H (2014) Policing engagement via social media. In Aiello LM and McFarland D (eds.) Social Informatics 2014: Revised Selected Papers. London, UK: Springer.

Fraustino JD and Ma L (2015) CDC's Use of Social Media and Humor in a Risk Campaign. “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse”. Journal of Applied Communication Research 43(2): 222-241.

Gerlitz C and Helmond A (2013) The like economy: Social buttons and the data intensive web. New Media & Society 15(8): 1348-1365.

Goldsmith A (2010) Policing’s new visibility. British Journal of Criminology 50(5): 914-934.

Goldsmith A (2015) Disgracebook policing: Social media and the rise of police indiscretion. Policing and Society 25(3): 249-267.

Lancione M (2014) The spectacle of the poor. Or: ‘Wow!! Awesome. Nice to know that people care. Social & Cultural Geography 15(7): 693-713.

McGovern A (2017) The Meme Team: Exploring the use of humour in police social media. Paper presented at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference 2017. Dec.8.

Nahon K and Hemsely J (2013) Going Viral. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Seiffert-Brockmann J and Diehl T (2017) Memes as games: The evolution of a digital discourse online. New Media & Society DOI: 10.1177/1461444817735334

Van De Velde B, Meijer A and Homburg V (2015) Police message diffusion on Twitter: analysing the reach of social media communications. Behaviour & Information Technology 34(1): 4-16.

Wilson DJ and Serisier T (2010) Video activism and the ambiguities of counter-surveillance. Surveillance & Society 8(2): 166-180.

News Media

Butler J (2017) There’s A Reason NSW Police Has Been Blowing Up Your Facebook Feed. Huffington Post Australia, May.2. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/05/02/we-met-the-meme-team-behind-nsw-polices-viral-social-media-game_a_22064383/ [Last accessed 22/11/2017]

REFERENCES

Collaborative policing

Boersma L (2013) Liminal Surveillance: An ethnographic control room study during a local event. Surveillance & Society 11(1/2): 106-120.

Denef S, Bayerl PS, and Kaptein NA (2013) Social media and the police: tweeting practices of british police forces during the August 2011 riots. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM. pp. 3471-3480.

Ericson R and Haggerty KD (1997) Policing the risk society. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Fowler BM (2017) Stealing thunder and filling the silence: Twitter as a primary channel of police crisis communication. Public Relations Review 43(4): 718-728.

Heverin T and Zach L (2010) Twitter for city police department information sharing. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 47(1): 1-7.

Huey L, Nhan J and Broll R (2013) ‘Uppity civilians’ and ‘cyber-vigilantes’: the role of the general public in policing cyber-crime. Criminology and Criminal Justice 13(1): 81-97.

Kang J (2013) Should Reddit be blamed for the spreading of a Smear? New York Times Magazine, Jul.25. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/magazine/ [Accessed 15/12/2017]

Kelling GL and Moore MH (2005) The Evolving Strategy of Policing. In T Newburn, (ed). Policing: Key Readings. London, UK: Willan. pp.88-108.

Koskela H (2011) Hijackers and Humble Servants: Individuals as Camwitnesses in Contemporary Controlwork. Theoretical Criminology 15(3): 269-282.

LexisNexis®Risk Solutions (2014) Survey of Law Enforcement Personnel and Their Use of Social Media. www.lexisnexis.com/investigations [accessed 15/12/2017]

Lippert R and Waldby K (2012) Municipal Corporate Security and the Intensification of Urban Surveillance. Surveillance & Society 9(3): 310-320.

Nhan J, Huey L, Broll R (2017) Digilantism: An analysis of crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombings. British Journal of Criminology 57(2): 341-361.

Procter R, Crimp J, Karstedt S, Voss A and Cantijoch M (2013) Reading the riots: what were the police doing on Twitter? Policing and Society 23(4): 413-436.

Schaefer, BP and Steinmetz KF (2014) Watching the Watchers and McLuhan’s Tetrad: The Limits of Cop-Watching in the Internet Age. Surveillance & Society 12(4): 502-515.

Trottier D (2014) Crowdsourcing CCTV surveillance on the Internet. Information, Communication & Society 17(5): 609-626.

Huey L, Ericson R and Haggerty K (2005) Policing Fantasy City. Cooley D (ed). In Re-imagining Policing in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp.140-208.

Trottier D (2015) Open source intelligence, social media and law enforcement: Visions, constraints and critiques. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4-5): 530-547.

Police presentational strategies

Au E (2013) Police on Facebook. NSW Police Force Magazine Police Monthly. Oct.10.

Manning PK (1997) Police work: the social organization of policing. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, p.119.

Meijer, A. J., and M. Thaens. 2013. Social Media Strategies: An Empirical Analysis of Emerging Social Media Strategies of North American Police Departments. Government Information Quarterly 30(4): 343–350.

Schneider CJ (2016) Police presentational strategies on Twitter in Canada. Policing and Society: An international journal of Research and Policy 26(2): 129-147.

Schneider CJ (2016) Policing and Social media: social control in an era of new media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Urban Institute and IACP (2017) 2016 Law Enforcement Use of Social Media Survey. A Joint Publication by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Urban Institute. Urban Institute, Washington DC .

http://www.theiacp.org/Portals/0/documents/pdfs/2016-law-enforcement-use-of-social-media-survey.pdf

[Last accessed 15-12-2017]

Community policing

Allan D, Kelly A, Stephenson A (2017) The Impact of a Changing Media Landscape on Police Practice and Legitimacy. Global Media Journal. 10(2):

http://www.hca.westernsydney.edu.au/gmjau/?p=2927

[Last accessed 15-12-2017]

Beshears ML (2017) Effectiveness of Police Social Media Use. American Journal of Criminal Justice 42(3): 489-501.

Kelly A (2015). Social media and police legitimacy. Australasian Policing 7(2): 37-39.

Kelly A and Finlayson A (2014) The new Neighbourhood Watch: How the NSW Police Force uses Facebook for community engagement. Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference, Swinburne University: 1-20

Kelly A and Finlayson A (2015) Can Facebook save Neighbourhood Watch? Police Journal: Theory Practice and Principles 88(1): 65-77.

Omanga D (2015) ‘Chieftaincy’ in the Social Media Space: Community Policing in a Twitter Convened Baraza. Stability: International Journal of Security & Development 4(1): 1-16.

Silverstone R and Haddon L (1996) Design and the Domestication of ICTs Technical Change and Everyday Life. In Silverstone, R. and Mansell, R., Eds., Communicating by Design The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp44-74.

SOCIAL MEDIA

FUTURE CRIMES,

QUIZ, AND REVIEW

NEXT WEEK

POLICY CONSIDERATIONS

PART 2:

NSW Police’s heavily criticized All the Single Ladies post

• On the one hand, social media offers substantial opportunities to improve connection with the community, to improve intelligence gathering, and to more effectively present their organisation to the public...

• On the other hand, social media offers up a wide range of risks to security, to the presentation of police and to the enforcement of law...

CHALLENGES

NSW POLICE'S MEME STRATEGY

- A LAUGHING MATTER?

• Alignment with organisational presentational strategy

• Authenticity

• Consistency: One major finding from the analysis of NSW Eyewatch evaluation was the problem of an inconsistent user experience. The literature suggests that the most used sites are ones that are active, consistent, are well-networked and well-connected to other social media and websites.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

• Write posts with a positive sentiment: studies have found that audience engagement on police social media pages have found that posts with a positive sentiment are more likely to be shared on by users than posts with a negative or neutral sentiment – for example, appealing to the public for information about a crime (Fernandez et al., 2014: 18).

• Increase the searchability of posts through including hashtags (de Velde et al. 2015: 11).

• Post before 4pm: material posted before 4pm is viewed at a higher rate and receives higher levels of engagement than material posted after this time (Fernandez et al., 2014: 18; de Velde et al., 2015: 11).

• Meijer and Thaens (2012): there are four dominant types of social media strategies used by government agencies:

• Push strategy: tend to consider the citizen as an audience and the social media as an old-fashioned broadcast channel.

• Pull strategy: tend to consider citizens as contributors, or sensors for information and social media as a consequence tends to be a channel for input.

• Networking strategy: tend to focus on the interactivity of the channel and citizens as co-producers of content and as co-producers of government policies.

• Transaction strategy: tends to view citizens as co-contributers of government.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT

• Empirical studies (Lieberman et al., 2013; Fernandez et al., 2014; van de Velde et al., 2015) have found that audience engagement with police social media content is driven by:

1) the characteristics of the content itself

2) the writing style

3) the time the content is posted

4) the author’s network position

• Fostering audience engagement:

• Write longer posts: Lieberman et al. (2013: 454) found that users were more likely to forward-on longer posts and posts that contained hyperlinks to other websites.

• Use Twitter mentions to demonstrate social engagement

• The NSW Project Eyewatch. Project Eyewatch began operations in New South Wales in 2011, Victoria in 2012 and in the Australian Capital Territory in 2014.

• It shares community engagement and crime reduction objectives with Neighbourhood Watch. In NSW the objectives of Project Eyewatch (NSW Police Force, 2013) are:

• Give the community greater access to police,

• Foster real-time engagement,

• Seek consensus on crime and policing problems,

• Provide the community with up-to-date information on local crime and policing events,

• Seek public feedback,

• Developing a high-value community network According to NSW Police.

• Project Eyewatch attempts to give the Neighbourhood Watch program “a 21st century makeover” (Maxwell, 2013:18).

• Crump (2011) offers several recommendations for ensuring that police departments:

• Encourage retweeting by creating more inviting content.

• Encourage debate, feedback and engagement

• Consider the balance between different types of posts

• Target demographic groups likely to receive the message (Ruddell and Jones 2013)

• Be aware of and responsive to community sentiment and concerns

• A 2017 survey of 539 law enforcement agencies (Urban Institute and IACP, 2017) reported that the two most challenging aspects of social media are monitoring agency activity on social media and measuring the impact of social media (p.11).

• Early research on 30 city police departments in large U.S. cities suggests that police largely used Twitter to disseminate information and the public primarily used Twitter to redistribute information shared by police departments such as traffic information, public service announcements and missing person announcements (Heverin and Zach 2010).

• Eyewatch: Keely and Finlayson note that there was little evidence of information flow in postings on these Eyewatch Facebook sites (Kelly and Finlayson, 2014).

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT

COMMUNICATION STRATEGY

NSW POLICE'S PROJECT EYEWATCH

INFORMATION GATHERING CHALLENGES

DR MARK WOOD

DR MARK WOOD

mark.wood@unimelb.edu.au