Similar to other public service providers, the police increasingly uses social media to communicate with citizens. Despite a rich body of research on how politicians or corporations use Twitter, knowledge on the police’s social media activities are scarce. Analyzing this form of communication, however, is crucial for political communication as the police now can bypass the media as a gatekeeper and directly relate with the public. The police thereby attains increased agency in its communication activities as they can directly influence how often or how information is shared on their work. In this, they can use direct communication through twitter, for example, as a way to help them in their core duties, i.e. increase the trust in and support for their services, but also to attempt to frame political debates relating to their work.
Given the limited amount of existing research, this paper presents a first exploratory analysis of the way in which the German police uses twitter. Based on an automated content analysis of all tweets (N = 135,758) send out in 2019 by 157 twitter accounts - representing all active twitter accounts of police entities in Germany - we investigate how frequently twitter is used to communicate, and how often different police accounts engage in dialogic forms of communication (i.e. retweets or replies). Moreover, we study in how far we can find different patterns regarding the use of twitter and hashtags between police entities in different jurisdictions, such as federal police, state police, police entities in larger cities or rural areas, and in the resonance these tweets create (i.e. likes and retweets).
