Abstract
Police presence on social media has become increasingly common in recent years and has arguably altered policing in many ways. Although research in this area is increasing, the growing presence of police on a range of social media platforms requires further examination of the various nuances that continue to emerge regarding this symbiosis. To that end, only a small number of studies have examined this topic from the perspective of police personnel in the Canadian context. Accordingly, drawing on in-depth interviews with police personnel overseeing police social media sites, this article examines how Canadian police services manage negativity and conflict online. The findings suggest that police services address negativity and conflict on their social media sites by drawing on the principles of procedural justice to guide their interactions. We discuss the implications of these findings and how police–public social media interactions might be improved.
Introduction
Recent scholarship on policing and police reform has focused a great deal of attention on the estrangement of police services from various parts of the community. This is especially true within the limited literature that has attempted to study the Black Lives Matter movement and/or other similar movements (e.g. Native Lives Matter) (Byrd et al., 2017; Mohler et al., 2022; Schroedel and Chin, 2020). Many scholars have largely attributed the cause of police–community estrangement to the dissolution of the established and perceived legitimacy of the police, often defined as the right to exercise power over civilians as a public service (Mawby, 2012; Tankebe, 2013; Tyler, 2011). Various factors have been noted as being responsible for the loss of police legitimacy and estrangement of community relations including the use of excessive force, poor displays of demeanour, abuses of authority and a general lack of effectiveness in solving crime (Porter and Alpert, 2017). Furthermore, several police misconduct complaints along with media coverage of police failures have had a profoundly negative impact on police–public relations (Schulenberg et al., 2017; Weitzer and Tuch, 2005; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah, 2022). Overall, there is a consensus among scholars that negative public perceptions of police behaviours and performance are highly detrimental to the legitimacy and general functioning of the police as a public service (O’Connor, 2008; Weitzer and Tuch, 2005; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah, 2022).
Stemming from the discussion of public perceptions of police legitimacy, there has been a considerable amount of attention placed on police reform (Lersch and Mieczkowski, 2005). Taking note of the reputational damage over time, police reforms and attempts to professionalize the police have included, for example, enhanced training, external oversight, specialized media-trained personnel, increased use of data, and a focus on community relations and partnerships (Bayley, 2008; Cordner, 2019; O’Connor and Shon, 2019; Walker, 2005). Of particular importance for this article is that many police services have adopted and implemented principles of procedural justice to guide their interactions with the public (Baron and Macdonald, 2020; Shon et al., 2021; Solum, 2004). Although discussed in more depth below, procedural justice at its core is about the people the police interact with feeling that they were treated fairly. If people feel they are treated justly, they are more likely to obey the law, cooperate with the police and perceive the police favourably (Shon et al., 2021; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003). At the same time, in an attempt to improve police legitimacy, a large number of police services have created social media accounts to relay and filter information to the public in the hope that it enhances connections and improves their reputation with their local and online communities (O’Connor and Zaidi, 2021; Walsh and O’Connor, 2019).
Although an abundance of literature exists on procedural justice concerning in-person police–public interactions, few have examined whether procedural justice principles guide police interactions online. Drawing on in-depth interviews with police personnel overseeing Canadian police services’ social media sites, this article contributes to the growing body of literature on police and social media by examining the extent to which police services are adhering to the principles of procedural justice when interacting with the public online. Accordingly, the research questions used to guide this study are: (1) What are the sources of conflict and negativity between Canadian police services and the public online and how do the police manage this?; and (2) Are Canadian police services following the principles of procedural justice when interacting with the public online? In what follows, we first examine how procedural justice has been conceptualized. The use and importance of the principles of procedural justice in police–public encounters, particularly on social media, are also discussed. We briefly critique the extant literature and provide a rationale for our study. Next, a detailed description of the study is provided in the Data and methods section followed by our findings, which speak to the quality of online interactions when exercising procedurally just ways of communication. The Discussion then analyses how the principles of procedural justice are being conceptualized by Canadian police services in online social media interactions. We argue that there is potential to improve police–public social media interactions by drawing on procedural justice principles when responding to the public online.
Literature review
The importance of the concept of legitimacy in policing is often discussed in relation to a police service's ability to maintain law-abiding behaviours within society and garner citizen cooperation on public matters (Tankebe, 2013). Citizens in any given society are inclined to obey the law and cooperate with law enforcement primarily because of their beliefs in the institution's legitimacy (Tyler, 2003). Thus, the public must have trust and confidence in the police, but there also needs to be an alignment in morals and values if legitimacy is to be maintained (Jackson et al., 2012; O’Connor, 2008). Given the prominent role of public perceptions in determining police legitimacy, Mazerolle et al. (2013) argue that police legitimacy is dependent on the treatment of individuals by police officers as well as their decision-making while practising authority. Similarly, other studies have cited fair decision-making, effective crime control and non-prejudicial treatment to be fundamental factors affecting the public's perception of police legitimacy (Hinds and Murphy, 2007; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003).
Given the potentiality of fraying public relations, increasing police legitimacy has become a paramount concern for police and policymakers. Consequently, many police services in western democracies have adopted principles of procedural justice to enhance their interactions with the public and provision of services (Antrobus et al., 2015). The principles of procedural justice address the quality of police–public interaction with a focus on how the police treat the public (Tyler, 2003). The key elements fundamental to procedural justice include: ‘dignity and respect, trustworthy motives, neutrality, and voice’ (Mazerolle et al., 2014: 3). Accordingly, police officers should treat members of society with respect and dignity, demonstrate a trustworthy demeanour, exhibit neutrality in their decision-making while interacting with the public, and provide genuine opportunities for the public to participate in the process of policing by taking their opinions into account (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003). Applying procedural justice principles in police practice aids in maintaining legitimacy and can increase the public's voluntary compliance with rules and regulations (Mazerolle et al., 2014; Tyler, 1990).
The principles of procedural justice in police practices are often examined through two divergent perspectives (Donner et al., 2015). First, police services’ adherence to procedural justice is examined by analysing the quality of decision-making procedures (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Solum, 2004). The processes of decision-making enacted by police services ought to be unbiased and effective in achieving a resolution in which the voice of citizen(s) is preserved (Mazerolle et al., 2014). Second, scholars have examined the quality of treatment received by the citizens in their encounters with police (Tyler and Huo, 2002). In doing so, researchers have examined whether the elements of respect and dignity are extended to citizens in police–civilian interactions. Taken together, it has been found that engaging with the public in a procedurally just manner is integral to the maintenance of police legitimacy in the eyes of the public (Donner et al., 2015).
However, more critical studies highlight issues that continue to tarnish police–public relations, even when police services adhere to procedural justice principles (Bell, 2017). One outcome has been that the discourse in which police organizations manage their brand has been altered, away from reactive crime control, to instead convey a sense of fairness, justice and protection (Deflem, 2016). More money has been allocated to bettering the image of police services, often through improving communication between the police and the public and educating the public on policing expectations (Keane and Bell, 2013; Mawby, 2010; Schneider, 2016). The concern here is that police present an image of themselves as being procedurally just to enhance police legitimacy and improve police–public relations, without necessarily ensuring that procedural justice principles occur in practice (Cordner, 2019; Keane and Bell, 2013).
As part of the effort to improve public relations, police services across the globe have joined various social media platforms (Schneider, 2021; Walsh and O’Connor, 2019). The use of social media allows police departments to communicate directly with the public, circumventing the traditional media (Cordner, 2019; O’Connor and Zaidi, 2021). Often, police have dedicated personnel to operate their social media channels and present a favourable view of policing to the public. Although, on the one hand, police have become more visible online (e.g. videos of misconduct can be posted and shared rapidly across social media platforms), social media at the same time provides police with a powerful tool to control the messages the public receive about them (O’Connor and Zaidi, 2021; Schneider, 2015; Wood and McGovern, 2021). Often, the goal of the police in using such ‘bureaucratic propaganda is to sustain the appearance of institutional police legitimacy’ (Schneider, 2021: 6)
There is insufficient space here to delve into the various nuances of police social media use (see Walsh and O’Connor (2019) for a review of recent research), and we instead focus on some of the work that has been done on social media and the police in Canada to help contextualize our research. Much of the Canadian research on police social media use has focused on what the police present to the public via their platforms and how various platforms are used. For example, Schneider (2016) and O’Connor (2017) have shown how the Toronto Police Service (TPS) and Canadian police services, respectively, can use Twitter to converse with the public, whereas Kudla and Parnaby (2018) examining TPS use of Twitter found little interaction with the public and that it was mostly used to bolster their image. Similarly, Walby and Wilkinson (2023), examining the Instagram posts of five Canadian police services, found that the police posts articulated a sense of diversity and community to their followers in an attempt to enhance their legitimacy.
Other research has examined how people interacting with and those operating police social media perceive police social media usage. For example, Ruddell and Jones (2013), surveying residents of a medium-sized city in Canada, found that those who accessed a police service's Twitter feed had more confidence in the police than those who did not. Trottier (2012) and Schneider (2016), examining the 2011 Vancouver riots that occurred after a hockey game, showed how citizens uploading pictures and videos to Facebook of suspected wrongdoers aided in police investigations. Similarly, Schneider (2016) showed how social media, in particular a video of the police shooting of Sammy Yatim in Toronto posted to YouTube, were used to counter the attempted narrative of the incident put forward by the police. Other researchers in Canada have spoken directly to the police about their social media use. Brown (2016), surveying police officers in Ottawa and Toronto, found that the potential for their behaviours to end up on social media altered their interactions with the public (e.g. they were less likely to use force). In addition, O’Connor and Zaidi (2021) interviewed police personnel operating social media platforms across Canada and found that crafting a favourable image of their service was a key rationale for using social media. Overall, how the police understand their social media work has been underexamined in the literature in Canada and elsewhere in exchange for a focus on what they present to the public.
Critique of existing literature
Although the literature on social media use by the police continues to grow and account for various nuances in its usage (Walsh and O’Connor, 2019), there is still much we do not know about police–public interactions on social media. The existing literature on police–public interactions has often focused on a singular platform and overwhelmingly utilized content analysis. As such, the breadth of knowledge on how the police are managing their interactions online and across multiple platforms is very limited. For example, researchers studying Twitter often cite a lack of engagement with the public (Brainard and Edlins, 2015), whereas those studying police interactions on Facebook report more engagement (Goldsmith, 2015). From a Canadian perspective, the work of Schneider (2016) and O’Connor (2017) shows how the use of Twitter by police can engage the public, but Kudla and Parnaby's (2018) work suggests a lack of engagement. Such contradictions within the findings of extant studies are indicative of the notion that limiting the analysis to a singular platform may be telling us more about the nature of the interactions that occur on that particular medium than the general nature of police–public interactions. Through in-depth interviews with police personnel in charge of social media messaging for police services in Canada, our study adds to the existing literature by examining how police personnel view interacting with the public across a range of social media platforms. We were particularly interested in whether there was evidence that these online interactions proceeded in procedurally just ways. The following section outlines in more depth the data and methods used to examine this issue.
Data and methods
The data for this study were collected using semi-structured in-depth interviews, conducted between July and September 2016, that were approximately 30 to 60 minutes in length. The nature of the semi-structured in-depth interviews allowed the participant and researcher to engage in a conversational interaction that has been shown to garner rich data. That is, the interview was treated as a conversation between the narrator (participant) and listener (interviewer) where stories could be freely shared (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). For example, the conversational design and open-ended nature of the questions allowed participants to explore new topics and clarify misunderstandings as they emerged (Babbie and Benaquisto, 2014). Thus, in addition to their initial responses to our structured questions, participants were able to add detail on their online conflict management strategies with the public. As such, probing questions, such as asking for examples, were often used to obtain further insight into matters being discussed.
Our initial sampling frame was all Anglophone police services in Canada. We then narrowed this list to the police services that had any type of social media presence. To recruit participants, we contacted these police services (n = 99) via their social media accounts and/or through an email directed at their social media personnel. In total, 31 participants from 29 Canadian police services were interviewed. This included police services in both urban and rural settings. More specifically, 4 police services were located in Eastern Canada, 14 were in Central Canada and 11 were in Western Canada. Overall, our sample of police services was heterogeneous and provided a range of perspectives from various locations which was the goal of our sampling approach.
Interviews with police personnel were conducted over the phone. Digital recordings, except for one participant who provided a written response, were made of each interview to ensure accuracy. The interviews were then transcribed and anonymized for analysis. Analysis was aided by qualitative analysis software (NVivo). That is, NVivo was used to code the transcripts and group common themes together. Codes were developed through three readings of the transcripts. First, the transcripts were analysed and coded inductively to uncover general categories discussing police–public conflicts/negativity encountered on police services’ social media platforms and how these encounters were managed. Second, responses related to conflicts/negativity faced by police personnel when interacting online were refined and compared across all transcripts, which enabled us to note cross-case similarities and co-occurrences of set practices and inferred rules of practice. This was particularly helpful given the lack of a standardized mandate dictating how police should use social media. Finally, the third read-through of the transcripts aimed at further refining our coding scheme and selecting quotes that best captured identified themes. Overall, our coding approach was iterative, which helped produce themes solidly grounded in the participants’ responses (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2012). In what follows, we aim to illustrate the logic and common conflict management strategies used by police services to manage conflicts/negativity that occur on their social media platforms. It should be noted that our findings are exploratory and not necessarily generalizable to all police services in Canada. Instead, our findings should be considered illustrative of the range of conflicts and negativity encountered online by police services and how this is understood and managed.
Findings
Following the method of analysis discussed above, three main themes were inductively derived from participants’ responses. These included: sources of conflict, organizational challenges and managing online interactions. Each theme is discussed in-depth in the following sections.
Sources of conflict
Given that police presence on social media platforms continues to grow, it is somewhat inevitable that police–public conflicts emerge online. One of the main goals of this study was to explore the potential sources of these conflicts. As discussed in this section, from the perspective of participants, the most prominently discussed sources of conflict or hostility when interacting online included: (a) a perceived us versus them mentality, (b) spread of misinformation, (c) previous unfavourable interactions with the police or the justice system in general, and (d) trending social justice campaigns or movements against police-related issues.
According to participants, the perceived us versus them mentality refers to the notion that the public often views the police as something external to the communities they serve rather than as a communal public service. Consequently, the public is sometimes unwelcoming or suspicious of having a police presence on social media. The majority of participants mentioned the public's adherence to such a mentality as a source of hostility and poor relations online. For example: We are dealing with them from a crime perspective. They are on Facebook and they are on our accounts…They are watching us from the perspective of ‘are they making any mistakes, is there a way in which if we post something that they can come back with a critique?’. (P12)
A second source of conflict on social media sites was dealing with misinformation that circulates online regarding police work and/or police officers. Several participants mentioned the spread of misinformation as an issue in online interactions. For example: … everyone has a camera on them so whatever you [do], no matter where you are, you’re on camera … so whether you didn't signal for one turn, that might instantly go towards our social media page … I mean [officers] never had to worry about that before and … now they have to … they have to worry about all these other people who don't know the situation…[For example,] so an officer parked in a handicapped spot but that's because they’re going into the convenience store because the convenience store was just robbed. So people just don’t always get the full situation because you’re on the outside but they instantly assume and then post it out there [on social media]. (P15)
The remaining sources of conflict were much less prominent in participants’ responses but are worthy of note. People who had previous in-person negative encounters with the justice system were noted as an additional source of conflict. From the participants’ perspectives, individuals with previous negative in-person interactions sometimes resorted to online platforms to convey their disdain for the police service. Similarly, participants mentioned having to address the impacts of local and international campaigns and movements. For example, participants noted that the public sometimes expressed hostility towards their police services for behaviour and incidents that occurred in a different jurisdiction or country. As one participant stated: I can throw the Rodney King situation, you only have 10 s of this video, you don’t know what was going on and just because you have a video or something you post on Facebook about the police, you don’t have the whole pic(ture) and you never will. And … those little things have started riots all over North America and all different kinds of cities big and small when it happens. (P13)
Organizational challenges
Responding to conflict and negativity aimed at police social media sites by the public was challenging for police services. Participants discussed several organizational challenges that impacted how police services interacted with the public online including: (a) lack of resources; (b) internal resistance; and (c) lack of training, policy and independence to respond. We discuss each of these challenges in turn in this section but they can all be encapsulated as internal organizational issues.
A lack of resources and/or time to respond to online complaints was mentioned by several participants. Although this response was more common among participants working at smaller police services than larger ones. For example: There is only a couple people who manage the comments and read those things and get the inbox messages … and everyone else in the organization doesn’t … so everything from the cheers to the jeers, everyone loves or hates everything we do and will write about it so it can be a little bit mentally draining on me to actually have to read them first of all. And also, try to, I guess, give appropriate responses. (P19)
A second form of organizational challenge was internal resistance. Participants noted that they had faced resistance from within their police services to engaging with the public online through social media platforms. These concerns mostly centred on the informal and unpredictable nature of the medium: There are a lot of people that feel more comfortable behind the keyboard saying things that they wouldn’t say to someone's face but you [the police service members] are still responsible for whatever you type in. And sometimes those things might get misinterpreted but you have to think about that, how is someone going to interpret this and how is it going to come back and bite me right? Whether you like it or not, you are representative of the organization. (P10)
The final organizational challenge mentioned by participants was a lack of training or policy on how to respond best to the public and/or the independence to respond to the public. Although some participants had formal social media training and policies in place governing their social media posts, several participants described their training and the policy surrounding social media use as ‘learn as you go’ (P12). Often, this meant that upper management micromanaged those operating police social media sites. Some expressed frustration with their lack of independence (e.g. having to seek approval before posting or responding to the public) when deciding how to interact with the public on various platforms. Thus, public engagement online was sometimes controlled by upper-level leadership within police services and/or ad hoc as no consistent policy existed to guide responses. However, the amount of flexibility given to those operating police social media sites (e.g. to respond to negative online posts) varied widely across police services.
Managing online interactions
The last key part of our analysis explores the various strategies police services used to manage online interactions. Our focus here is primarily on how negative comments directed toward the police are dealt with. Participants noted several strategies that they used to manage these interactions. As discussed in this section, these included: (a) ignoring negativity; (b) attempting dialogue; and (c) deleting, muting and blocking posts.
Participants often noted that negativity directed at police services was commonplace. One key strategy used to combat this negativity was simply to ignore it. As participants stated: Online arguments, you can’t win … it is one of those things that if you get caught in a war of words, it just goes on and on and on so it's just easier [to ignore it], we might make a public statement but then after that, we have nothing else to say. (P10) If it is someone that's ranting and they’re not asking for something they’re just ranting … we get a lot of traffic … rants, if they are complaining about getting a speeding ticket or a parking ticket or complaining about photo radar, for example, we just let them do it. (P15)
Ignoring negative comments sometimes meant that the public stepped in to address the negativity directed at the police. For example: A lot of the time we will post stuff on there and we will get that one person that has nothing but negative things to say and some people come out and defend us and tell them to basically shut up or stop posting and they kind of police themselves. (P11)
In a sense, supporters of the police were counted on to defend them on social media. In addition, police distract from the negativity by posting good news stories and the ‘negative comment quickly gets buried in the stream’ (P23).
A second strategy used by police services was to attempt to dialogue with people online about their (negative) comments. This sometimes entailed providing people with information and clarifications. For example: If someone has a formal complaint or they wish to make a formal complaint but so far they’re only doing it through social media, we have a standard response where we let them know that social media isn’t the proper place to make a formal complaint and in order to do that, here are the steps. (P15)
Often, the goal was to take the conversation offline so that a more robust, less public, dialogue could be had. For example: Some people are completely outrageous and unreasonable [when they] speak with us through social media … others have valid concerns or comments and I am happy [to] have an open dialogue with them, usually through direct messaging or … telephone calls, not in an open platform … I find talking is the best way to deal with them. Some people just want to be heard, so just letting them rant for five minutes on the phone will go a long way. (P26)
For most police services, those deemed as internet trolls were often ignored but those deemed as genuinely asking questions or having legitimate comments were engaged with. Although determining which group a member of the public belonged to was a subjective determination and varied across police services.
The final strategy mentioned by participants for managing online interactions was to selectively delete, mute or block posts/users from their social media sites. This was often described as a last resort but could occur for a variety of reasons. Although most participants noted that they generally allowed people to post whatever they wanted while responding to police social media posts, there were limits. These limits included obscenity, profanity, misinformation, privacy violations, threats, criminality and hate speech. One of the key time-consuming things that needed to be monitored was privacy violations: We had a case where we put a media release out on Facebook saying you know XYZ has been charged with say child porn. Then what happens is you will get people starting to comment on that ‘I know this guy he is so and so, has been doing this for 12 years’ or ‘what a creep and we should kill him’ … ‘He lives at this address.’ (P21) If someone says that you guys [the police] suck because my wife Mary Jones had you guys arrest me under false pretences last night, we are going to hide that comment but if somebody says you guys suck … okay have a nice day. (P14) We won’t accept abusive language or foul language so if someone is swearing it gets removed. If they continue to post multiple times and we have to remove it multiple times, we will actually ban people from the page for a period of time. Usually, we tell them that we are putting them on time[out] and after a while we will add them back. (P16)
Although some of this monitoring was automated (e.g. Facebook can automatically filter out certain words from being used in the comments section), police services still manually monitored the comments posted on their sites, which was resource intensive.
The majority of participants noted that they blocked people or posts rarely. Some police services posted policies as to acceptable commenting. However, how violations were handled varied by incident and police service. For example, some strictly enforced the rules: So we have a policy statement on our social media feed that tells people what our rules are … Any type of criminality, threats, racial comments, hate, all of that is watched for and removed and if it occurs, we actually block those users. I think it's important that those rules are laid out. We do get to control what goes on and off it and as a police agency we don’t want to create an environment in which others can hurt people. (P12)
Most participants took a more flexible case-by-case approach in that although rules were enforced, violations were used as an opportunity to educate/remind the public of their policies and appropriate behaviour on their social media sites. For example: Everyone has the right to their opinion and if we delete all those then it shows that we are trying to hide something so we will leave certain things up but if it goes to the extreme then yeah we will delete it or ask the person to stop. (P11) It's pretty rare [to block someone]. I mean if someone goes out of their way to continually use inappropriate language, then okay, you know what this is a part of our terms of use. Then you get kind of three strikes and then you’re out. So I mean people can swear sometimes, especially regarding media releases about someone bad. People can use their foul language [but not] if they’re using it … to say like F you police or F you pigs or that kind of thing. If it's just this person uses a word, okay well then you’re just being passionate about something … but didn’t mean to do harm by it kind of thing and it gets automatically hidden but we are not going to block you because of it. (P15)
It appears for the most part that police position their social media spaces as places for open debate, within reason. Although the boundaries of this dialogue online were constantly renegotiated within the subjective limits placed on the public by police services.
Discussion
Our findings mostly align with participant 18's argument that policing social media ‘really is no different than how we [the police] would act on the streets’. More specifically, in both real and virtual worlds, conflict/negativity is encountered regularly, there are limited resources to address the range of issues encountered, and attempts are made to deal with the public in procedurally just ways. Although we were unable to measure the effectiveness of how police managed negativity/conflict online, we were able to examine how police personnel tasked with managing social media sites understood their role and described their interactions with the public. However, it should be noted that we do not know whether this actually occurred in practice, but this is how the police perceived their use of social media. Thus, in this section, we examine the quality of interactions and the extent to which online social media interactions with the public were managed in procedurally just ways. Although there are slight variations in the literature as to the specificities inherent in procedural justice principles, we focus on three broad interconnected principles:
Principle 1: The public has an opportunity to have a voice. Principle 2: There was a process in place that guides interactions/communications with the public that is fair, transparent and neutral (everyone is treated the same). Principle 3: People were treated with respect and dignity, which includes police genuinely listening to and addressing the public's concerns (Mazerolle et al., 2014; Shon et al., 2021; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003).
Therefore, procedural justice in police work is defined here by the fairness in processes initiated by those who hold the authority to control or manipulate the outcomes (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003).
Police services’ visibility online whether through their social media accounts or via the public sharing content (e.g. videos of police misconduct) has led to conflicts between the public and the police being moved online (Walsh and O’Connor, 2019). The public is watching the police, critiquing their mistakes/behaviour and attempting to seek justice for things they perceive as wrongdoings. Social media platforms provide a venue through which the public can voice their concerns. From our participants’ responses and the wider literature on police social media, we can discern that police are listening to the public and responding. That is, they are aware of the negativity directed their way and have responded to the public by attempting to educate them on what they perceive as misunderstandings. They also attempt to counter the us versus them mentality by aligning their police services closely with the local community. Both these approaches work to craft an image of the police as experts and authority figures on public safety, but also as good public servants (O’Connor, 2017; O’Connor and Zaidi, 2021).
However, the one thing we did not encounter in our interviews was an acknowledgement that some of the public's critiques might be accurate. For example, sometimes negativity/critiques were ignored or supporters on social media platforms policed the naysayers, other times critiques were engaged with and clarifications were attempted, and yet at other times police posts were used to distract (e.g. good news stories) from negative comments. This suggests that although the public has a space to voice their concerns and is being listened to (principle 1), they are not necessarily being respected by being heard or taken seriously when they have a legitimate complaint/critique (principle 3). Instead, critiques of the police on social media were often taken as an opportunity to correct the record and control the narrative. We would argue that this is potentially a missed opportunity for police to learn from their communities. Unfortunately, given the nature of our study, we do not know whether the public felt that their voices were being genuinely heard and acted upon. Future studies should examine whether the public feels that communicating with the police via social media allows them to be heard on policing matters.
Although varying in specificities between police services, there were processes in place at most police services that attempted to guide social media communications in a fair manner (principle 2). First, ignoring negative comments or allowing followers to engage with negative posts on the police's behalf was one strategy. This seems like an effective use of discretion because police officers on the street would not engage with every negative comment directed their way or indiscretion they might see. A second strategy was to attempt a dialogue with people by offering them additional information (e.g. where to make a formal complaint against an officer) or explanations and to talk out their concerns (sometimes offline). Again, this aligns with the principles of procedural justice in that it allows people a voice, engages them in a conversation and attempts to resolve an issue fairly. Finally, as a last resort, police services would delete posts and/or mute/block users, but this too was often guided by a procedurally just process. That is, violations of posting guidelines, inappropriate comments (e.g. profanity) and privacy violations led to comments being deleted, but this often came with a warning to the poster, a chance to educate the public/users on appropriate posting, and an opportunity for the poster who violated the guidelines to return to making comments (e.g. a violator might have three chances before they are temporarily or permanently blocked from posting on their sites).
Overall, our findings suggest that police services’ social media usage is broadly guided by the principles of procedural justice. However, this does come with some important caveats and open questions about how best to apply procedural justice principles to a social media environment. First, as with in-person interactions, engaging people in procedurally just ways seems to work best if it entails a back-and-forth conversation between people (Shon et al., 2021). That did not always occur online because some people were simply ignored. Although it would not be possible to fully engage with every person's comment online owing to resource constraints, not doing so also presumably leaves the public wondering whether the police are taking their comments and concerns seriously. Second, and similarly, taking conversations offline, although likely an effective way of addressing individual concerns, could potentially signal to users that the police are hiding something or that they are unwilling to discuss issues publicly. Third, given the above two issues, the choice of how and when to engage with comments online becomes of paramount concern in illustrating to the public that the police are engaging with them in procedurally just ways. These subjective choices raise questions about who gets the police services’ attention online. It also runs the risk of excluding comments from those who often hold more negative views of the police (e.g. young people, visible minorities) (O’Connor, 2008), and thus replicating the existing biases that exist in face-to-face encounters in the online environment. The concern is that those with legitimate concerns get dismissed as internet trolls rather than taken seriously and engaged with.
Our interviews with police personnel illustrate how police social media feeds are curated for the public, but unfortunately, a limitation of our study is that we were unable to examine how the public perceived and understood police social media use. More research is needed on whether the public feels that they are interacted with by the police on social media in procedurally just ways, rather than just relying on police perspectives saying they are as our study did. Given this, while we can say that it appears the principles of procedural justice guided police interactions on social media, it is difficult to say whether this impacted public perceptions of police legitimacy. An additional limitation of our research is that it only examined the police services’ perspective on their social media use in one country with a select few police services, all of varying sizes and working in a range of communities. This study provided rich details on police uses of social media, but our findings are not necessarily generalizable to all police services, although our interviews did reach a saturation point where no new information was being obtained in subsequent interviews. Therefore, more research is needed on how procedural justice principles are, or are not, utilized online by the police and how these compare with face-to-face interactions. It would also be interesting to compare whether accomplishing procedurally just interactions require different approaches depending on the social media platforms being used and different types of users.
Conclusion
Our findings indicate that, for the most part, the police services we spoke with in Canada were following procedural justice principles when engaging with citizens online through their social media accounts. If this is indeed perceived by the public in this way, it should theoretically enhance police legitimacy. It might be fruitful for police services to explore how procedural justice principles could be more systematically integrated into how police engage with the public online. None of our participants mentioned procedural justice in their responses, but the key tenets of its principles appear to be guiding their approaches. Enshrining these principles more clearly could help overcome ambiguity around how to respond, particularly when upper-level leadership needs to approve responses. Drawing on principles of procedural justice could help police services respond to the public in more transparent and substantive ways rather than in ways that maximize their carefully crafted images. To accomplish this, police services could benefit from evaluating their social media use to determine whether its use is meeting its purpose, improving police–community relations, enhancing police legitimacy and trust, and determining whom they are reaching and excluding on their social media sites.
Our interviews with police service personnel revealed how they handled conflict and negativity online; however, we do not know how this played out in practice. For example, Wu and Huang (2020) examining police replies to the public in the United States via their Facebook pages found that police services replied to only 0.1% of comments posted. Very few of these interactions involved engaging with negative comments, whereas police services were quick to respond to positive comments. Similarly, Kudla and Parnaby (2018) examining public replies to tweets sent by the TPS found very little public–police interaction and instead found that Twitter was mostly used to enhance the service's image. Therefore, more research is needed on how negativity and conflict online are handled in practice in comparison with the intended approaches.
In addition, much has changed in the world of social media since our interviews were conducted. Police are using new social media platforms (e.g. TikTok), social media platforms are changing (e.g. Twitter is now X and under new management and use guidelines, Facebook is now Meta and blocking Canadian news sites from the public), and world events have substantially shifted the conversation on policing (e.g. the murder of George Floyd in police custody). However, our data remains relevant because few have interviewed police about their social media use and even fewer have examined social media use by the police through the lens of procedural justice. Thus, although our data is somewhat dated and only captures a moment in time, it remains unique in that regard. Future researchers should confirm whether our findings are still applicable to the ever-changing social media environment of today. Thus, caution is warranted when interpreting our results as police use of social media may have changed since our interviews took place.
Overall, public interactions with the police online provide a window into public perceptions of police services, especially from those who might hold consistently negative views of the police but are reluctant to speak out in other ways. However, how police services can harness this to improve policing rather than improve the image of police is still an open question. Incorporating procedural justice principles into online interactions with the public may point to a way forward.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
