Policing and social media: Exploring police digital visibility

Abstract

This article explores the perspectives of police officers and police civilian staff in England who engage with social media as part of their professional practice. It uniquely focuses on how these police professionals use visual tools, namely photographs, videos, emojis, infographics, memes and visual GIFs as part of their communicative police practices. The research is informed by qualitative interviews with police participants. Drawing on perspectives related to police visibility and semiotics, we explore ways in which the police attempt to extend traditional manifestations of visibility and to develop a ‘digital visibility’ through the purposeful and strategic use of visual tools. Four themes are identified relating to the motivations and use of visual tools online – standing out and developing a symbolic police presence online; the development of digital visibility of police work; humanising police digital interactions; and the challenges of incorporating the visual.

Introduction

Social media is now embedded into our social fabric and daily lives. In this article, we explore the contemporary use of social media by the police in England by presenting perspectives from police officers and civilian staff who engage with and use social media as part of their professional practice. Although the use of social media in policing is not new, we uniquely examine how these police professionals utilise the increasing visual functionality supported by social media platforms (primarily Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram and YouTube). We consider a range of social media ‘visual tools’ including the use of photographs, videos, emojis, infographics, GIFs and visual memes as part of police communicative practices. The article makes an important contribution to contemporary understanding of police-community engagement by exploring how traditional manifestations of police visibility, which have become synonymous with notions of legitimacy, public trust and power, are reinterpreted in these newer contexts.

The article begins by establishing the intellectual and conceptual parameters of our discussion. We then outline the conceptual importance of police visibility and semiotics to our discussion – laying the foundation for our argument that police use of visual tools on social media is heavily influenced by traditional visual signs and symbols of the police evident in the physical world. We then identify four key themes that emerge from our qualitative interviews with police officers and staff. Each theme showcases how policing today is heavily influenced by the visual.

Overarchingly, we argue that social media and the visual functionality that it supports provide a contemporary platform through which the police can extend and evolve their visibility and public engagement – referred to throughout as police ‘digital visibility’. We also argue that this digital visibility is heavily influenced by traditional iconography of policing in the physical world rather than offering something entirely new. We highlight several challenges that must be addressed if the promise of digital police visibility is to be fully realised.

Introducing policing and social media

Social media has provided a new opportunity for the police to become more visible and to engage with the public – one that has the potential to engender openness, transparency and citizen engagement in public policing (Bullock, 2018). Police services have often been criticised for being insular and unilateral in their communication practices (HMIC, 2011a; Mawby, 2010). However, the advent of social media provided an opportunity for them to reconfigure their relationships with the public through the use of more creative and interactive practices. Despite this potential, the integration of social media into police work has not been without its challenges and while visibility online has increased, police communication on social media is often one-way rather than dialogic (Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2015; Lieberman et al., 2013; Ralph, 2021; Ralph et al., 2022).

Initially, much of the empirical attention on police use of social media focused on the roll-out and operationalisation of social media within police organisations (Bullock, 2016, 2018; Crump, 2012; Dekker and et al, 2020; Schneider, 2014). This painted a picture of organisational complexity and resistance which collectively hampered the police from realising the potential of utilising social media. Several studies, for example, highlighted the tension between the often rigid, hierarchical and control structures underpinning police/public communication practices, which were at odds with the more personal and individual narratives that are often required for successful and impactful social media engagement (Bullock, 2016; Goldsmith, 2015). This was due to the perceived fragility of the police’s public reputation and the assumed risk posed to this relationship if things go wrong with more open social media accounts and autonomous police narratives (Goldsmith, 2015). Accordingly, a professional anxiety has been observed towards social media across police organisations – from senior officers concerned with protecting the police reputation due to its assumed centrality to maintaining police legitimacy; to the rank and file officers who fear saying or doing something on social media that will cause them professional harm (Bullock, 2016, 2018; Schneider, 2014).

Despite these complexities, the police in England and Wales have an active presence on social media – with all 43 police services having official accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube; although there are likely to be hundreds of other social media accounts associated with police services beyond their ‘official’ presence. These include team accounts set up by departments, units and specialist groups within the service (e.g. firearms; dogs; horses); and individual officer accounts – each of which use social media for different purposes and provide their own insights into policing. In 2017, Fernandex et al. identified approximately 2500 police accounts in the UK – 48 corporate and 2350 decentralised accounts. The total is now likely to be even higher given that social media has grown in popularity year after year (Statista, 2024). This presents an ongoing regulation challenge for police leaders seeking ways to ensure that police engagement online remains professional and in line with organisational values.

The police use their social media presence in diverse ways, ranging from information about crime prevention; calls for citizen participation in the identification of missing persons and offenders; traffic updates; and as a mass communication tool in times of public unrest or emergency (Bullock, 2016; Dekker and et al, 2020; de Graaf and Meijer, 2019). However, the often one-way communication with the public is at odds with the initial promise of social media to stimulate conversations. Accordingly, some argue that social media is merely about image work for the police – providing them with an open platform where they can control the message and the image of the police in an era where there are increasingly pluralised sources of information and images of the police and their conduct, for instance from traditional and new media sources and the growth of citizen journalism online (Bullock, 2018; Goldsmith, 2010; Greer and McLaughlin, 2010; Wood and McGovern, 2021; Wood, 2019).

This criticism has prompted a second wave of police-community engagement practices on social media, where more creative, often visual, tools are being employed by the police to facilitate more public communication online. An example of this includes what Wood (2019) refers to as a ‘meme strategy’ whereby the police use images of police dogs and horses to encourage different communities to engage with the police. This is at odds with initial police social media practices that have been commonly text-based and corporate. Referring to the practices of the New South Wales Police in Australia, Wood highlights the ‘crowded attention economy’ (p. 53) of social media and the associated power, albeit short-term power, of police humour and images in their social media practices, to capture public attention and facilitate engagement (Wood and McGovern, 2021; Wood, 2019). This has been helped by the wider evolution of social media and mobile technologies that allow users to be content creators – by generating and using increasingly visual products such as photographs, videos, GIFs, visual memes, emojis and other images to include in their social media posts. These increasingly visual practices can be observed on the social media accounts of police services in England but have not yet been subject to empirical examination. This article addresses this empirical deficit, by presenting perspectives from police officers and police staff in England who utilise social media as part of their professional practice – exploring the rationale and professional motivation for doing so; how they integrate visual tools into their social media posts; the associated challenges and the perceived impact on public engagement with the police.

Conceptual foundations

The characteristics, impacts and challenges of ‘the visual’ have been concerns for visual criminology (e.g. McClanahan, 2021) and have been studied across the criminal justice system. Francis (2009) contends that the visual image has democratised crime control given that citizens can produce and reproduce their own images with relative ease. Further, Carrabine (2012: 467) contemplates that visual images can at times raise ethical concerns and that we the ‘lookers’ have a moral responsibility not to reduce human misery to ‘a set of aesthetic concerns’. This raises three key points. First, seeing is important to how people make sense of the world and pictures are often better remembered by people (Defeyter et al., 2009). Second, ‘the visual’ is central to much of the way that criminal justice operates. As Ferrell et al. (2004: 4) articulate: ‘Images of crime and crime control have now become as ‘real’ as crime and criminal justice itself’. Third, images represent a double-edged sword, and they need to be understood and read with caution and within context.

According to Mawby (2002) the police are involved in ‘image work’ as they attempt to create and communicate stories, images, and meanings of policing, with the aim to improve their legitimacy and reputational ‘image’. A way to understand the communication of ‘image’ is through semiotics, which is concerned with sign value and symbolic meaning, and how these are created, communicated, perceived and interpreted. The work of Barthes (1985) is influential, particularly the idea that the meaning of image-based products rests on subjective interpretation; as Barthes (1985: 357) notes, ‘I try to reflect on them, to see what my consciousness tells me about the essence of the photograph’. Barthes described the literal description of an image as the ‘denotation’ and the more subjective and personalised interpretation of an image’s meaning by the individual/audience as the ‘connotation’.

Academic interest in people’s semiotic understanding of police activity is not new – Millie (2012), for example, explores how meanings attached to police stations can contribute to reassurance by affecting people’s emotive ‘readings’ of security and safety. Elers and Elers (2020) also identify how the inclusion of cultural designs on police cars and uniforms could damage relationships between the police and indigenous communities in Australia due to subjective interpretations of fraught histories and violence that such imagery provokes. A semiotic understanding of the police’s use of images on social media is useful in highlighting how these images can be read differently (even by the same people in different circumstances). They may be read as signs of reassurance; or of a professional, legitimate service or whatever else the police hope for in using these images. But, as with the cultural designs applied to police cars and uniforms in Australia, audiences may also have quite different readings.

Digital visibility relates to ‘the likelihood of being “seen” in the sense of being noticeable [. . .] in being heard or noticed, or in the sense of being respected or recognised’ (Brandtner and Stehle, 2021: 93). In a policing context, this centres on the state of the police being observable and distinguishable online. Echoing earlier studies in policing (e.g. see Goldsmith, 2010; Haggerty and Sandhu, 2014; Mawby, 1999), we use visibility to underline the significance and importance placed within the police on being seen by citizens. The nature and performance of policing is heavily embedded in the visual (McClanahan, 2021). Public experience and perceptions of the police are shaped by their interaction and association with the visual signs and symbols that have become synonymous with the symbolic power of the police (Waddington, 1999) – from traditional police uniforms, police cars and blue flashing lights, police equipment (e.g. the truncheon and notepad) and the police estate (e.g. police stations) (Millie et al., 2024; Rowe et al., 2023). Manning (1992) similarly highlights how there are certain activities, routines, prompts and symbols that the police claim and display repeatedly to reaffirm their mandate. This is reflected in political dialogue related to the police where the protection of the ‘front line’ and the traditional uniformed officer continues to be an unnegotiable priority (Millie, 2014).

In recent years, the conceptualisation of police visibility has evolved. Where traditional ideas of police visibility rely on a physical, primary observation of the police during the execution of their duties, there has been an acknowledgement that this observation can be captured in other, non-physical spaces. Goldsmith (2010), for example, highlights how ‘secondary visibility’ of the police can be observed as a result of increased news media coverage as well as the emergence and availability of mobile and video technology that allow the public to capture and share their accounts and interactions with the police. However, central to Goldsmith’s conception of ‘secondary visibility’ of policing is that it is those far removed from policing who can provide this new form of visibility. In contrast, we argue that this pluralisation of police visibility can also be extended by the police themselves through their embedded use of visual tools that they capture, produce and publish on social media – as a form of police digital visibility and an effort to be seen. Elsewhere, this is described by Wood (2019) as police ‘engagement work’ and includes communication practices that strive to be noticed by a bigger audience. This is particularly pertinent in an era where policing is becoming increasingly abstract (Terpstra et al., 2019, 2022); operating more at a distance or removed from the public due to reductions in police budgets and workforce (HMIC, 2011b; Millie, 2014).

As such, we acknowledge that the nature of police work is not confined only to the physical space but also to digital spaces simultaneously. This contemporary digital visibility incorporates a performance of some of the traditional expectations that have become synonymous with police visibility (e.g. uniformed officers on patrol), but also includes new and more nuanced accounts of police work, police engagement with the public, as well as providing visibility to the ‘backstage’ of policing (cf. Holdaway, 1980) that has been traditionally off-limits to the public eye.

Methodology

Ethical approval for the project was granted by the lead institution, and all participants and police services are anonymised. In stage one of the research, we conducted an initial desk-based review of the main ‘official’ accounts of all 43 police services in England and Wales. All data for this stage were publicly available. We analysed all posts published on Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram and YouTube throughout August 2019 and coded each post to identify where visual tools had been incorporated into posts. Visual tools included videos, photographs, GIFs, visual memes, emojis, livestreams and infographics. This initial review revealed that 21% of police social media posts were text-only, while 79% included a visual element.

In stage two, the substantive focus of this article, interviews were conducted with police officers and staff from four police services between August 2020 and January 2021. The four police services were chosen because of their varying size and represented a mix of urban and rural areas. A total of 28 semi-structured interviews were conducted with police participants, all of whom were recruited because of their use of social media as part of their professional police practice.

Due to government restrictions on in-person human interaction during the Covid-19 pandemic, these interviews were held predominately on Microsoft Teams or Zoom, with a handful being conducted over the telephone. Participants were asked about their use of visual tools as part of their social media practices; the motivations and context in which they used such tools; their perceived effectiveness and any challenges that are associated with using them. All participants were reminded at the beginning of the interview that their participation was voluntary and reassured that their contribution would be confidential. These interviews were anonymised, transcribed and analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2022) using the qualitative software NVivo. The main themes that emerged related to the nature and motivations of the police incorporating visual tools on social media as part of their professional practice.

Within each of the four police services we had a key contact/gatekeeper who helped facilitate our recruitment. We were keen to recruit a mix of officers and staff who actively used social media at work – with existing research highlighting how both professionals and police officers play a role in police social media engagement (Bullock, 2016, 2018). We also wanted to ensure that we included participants who used different types of accounts – including the ‘official’ corporate accounts operated by a dedicated centralised unit; ‘team’ accounts operated by a collection of individuals working in a particular police functional areas and ‘individual’ accounts which provide decentralised coverage from one person.

This resulted in a mix of regular police officers, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) ¹ , Special Constables ² and police staff taking part in the study. Their social media responsibilities ranged from communicating via police social media accounts to overseeing and designing police social media practices. Participants communicated via police accounts on Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube and/or Instagram.

Findings: Benefits and challenges of digital policing

The use of visual tools is a central communicative tool for the police on social media. Our desk-based analysis of official social media posts by all 43 police services in England and Wales during August 2019 recorded 9943 social media posts, of which 7811 (79%) included a visual element. In the second stage of the research, we conducted qualitative interviews with a diverse range of police officers and staff. From these discussions four key themes emerged – the need to stand out and develop a symbolic police presence online; the development of digital visibility of police work; the aim to humanise police digital interactions; and the challenges of incorporating the visual. Each of these themes is looked at in turn.

Standing out and developing a symbolic police presence online

A consensus across all participants was that text-only posts alone on social media were no longer perceived to be an effective tool of police-community communication and engagement. Many talked of such posts receiving little interaction and going unnoticed by the public – in terms of comments, ‘likes’ or re-tweets/shares, despite a strong professional motivation for their engagement on social media to facilitate interactions with communities. In contrast, the participants viewed visual outputs, accompanied by text-based information, to be much more effective in getting seen online within the competitive ‘crowded attention economy’ (Wood, 2019: 53) of social media.

With this challenge in mind, we identified several strategic communication tools that the participants used incorporating the visual, in order to ‘stand out’ and gain the attention of the public, so that they then read and – hopefully – acted on the important public-related information the police were trying to communicate (for instance, related to crime prevention information, public calls for assistance or major incidents). These tools purposefully included signs, symbols and objects that were synonymous with the authority, credibility and visibility of the police in the physical world, with the objective that they would be similarly read by the public when seen in digital formats online.

Central to our discussion with participants who managed ‘official’ accounts of police services was their strategic objective to develop a police ‘brand’ online so that the public instantly recognised that it was their local police service that was trying to communicate with them. However, there was a tension observed between being authentic in the provision of credible and relatable visual content and the need for this to be managed and produced to meet the expectations of the police service and social media platforms. Several acknowledged that, historically, they had overused stock images of police that they thought had been ineffective in capturing the attention of the public. More recently, however, there had been a strategy to develop a portfolio of more tailored visual products to use online, that captured real uniformed officers in the course of their duties. These images give an insight into the diversity of the police workforce and include local landmarks–the aim being to produce the sense of localism, reassurance and authority by the public seeing images of officers on patrol in real life, physically within their communities.

Consistency of style and the use of colour were also discussed in terms of building a recognisable police ‘brand’. For example, two police services in our study had started theming the information they were communicating via social media and were using standardised coloured filters and text banners alongside images to differentiate between themes. For instance, one police service had developed a portfolio of images of traditional representations of their police officers in the community (e.g. officers on patrol in uniform; representations of suspects in handcuffs; police cars) and paired these with infographic banners and colour filters on top of the image, which accompanied the text information that was being communicated. This also attempted to classify the importance level of the information that was being communicated (e.g. using a red filter for the most important forms of communication and yellow for community engagement stories) by the police to the public that they come to associate with their local police service within the social media feeds over time.

Alongside the use of colour, the police actively used symbols or policing icons to represent the service, such as the inclusion of the police crest on all visual outputs posted on official police accounts, in an attempt to authenticate the post and the credibility of the information being communicated as coming ‘from the police’. This was deemed increasingly important in an era of ‘fake news’:

Have it branded with the police logo and like a statement to update people, because I think quite often that is obviously shared. It just, it can look very professional. It’s obvious that it’s coming from the police, the message. There’s a lot of fake news as well on social media, so it means that it’s more likely to be trusted (Interview 20, Police Staff)

Developing digital visibility of police work

The visibility of the police has been seen as an important aspect of police work, linked to their legitimacy, authority and the reassurance they provide to the public. Historically this has been addressed in relatively narrow terms related to the real-world patrol of frontline uniformed officers. Waddington (1999), for example, refers to police patrol as a ‘performance’ motivated by the aim to promote and reassert police symbolic authority. However, in a contemporary climate where policing is becoming increasingly ‘abstract’ (Terpstra et al., 2019, 2022), the physical visibility of the police through traditional patrol alone is under threat. Yet, social media provides a contemporary opportunity to perform visibility in different ways, with many of our participants acknowledging that it is an essential practice as the nature and parameters of policing become increasingly digital:

There’s no longer a traditional . . . Dixon of Dock Green bobby on the beat. The nature of policing has changed. We are in a digital age. And I think public expectation, that you might not see a policeman on the street, or police lady on the street, or police officer even, on the street, but if you tweet you’ll get a response (Interview 23, Police Staff)

Specifically, visual tools on social media–such as photographs and videos–provide the police with opportunities to evidence the visibility of officers in the physical world. Many officers talked about their efforts to capture and post videos and photographs when they are out engaging with the community as it showcases that the police are still visible and engaging. One officer explained their motivation for publishing regular pictures of themself on duty:

Even on days like that where it is absolutely chucking it down we’re still out there, we’re still doing the job, we’re still keeping the area protected and it’s, I think, it’s important for members of the public to see (Interview 25, Police Officer)

More critically, the motivation for positing visual accounts of their police practice on social media was not solely linked to public reassurance. Just as Bullock (2016) argues that social media is used as a tool of impression management and image work by the police, we similarly found that there were less overt motivations for utilising visual tools, linked to controlling and challenging public narratives of the police:

They loved us putting out pictures of us on patrol and because it negates that stereotype that you never see a bobby on the beat. And also because the fact is that yeah, you probably don’t because you don’t sit down and look out your window twenty-three hours a day. . . . So if you can see on Twitter that they’ve been by then they know that you’re out and about. (Interview 10, Police Officer)

These are examples, according to Goldsmith (2010), of the police being subject to increasing and competing accounts and impressions. Our data suggest that the police are not exempt from contributing to these impressions, and the use of visual tools on social media showcasing their activities in the non-digital world is an attempt to evidence that they are routinely embedded in the community doing purposeful work, representing an extension of traditional police visibility. However, rather than this being an example of Goldsmith’s (2010) ‘secondary’ visibility (representations of the police created and captured by those divorced from policing), we argue that this is an example of police digital visibility – where the police are the authors of narratives and representations of themselves on social media. In this vein, publishing visual representations of physical police work on social media is an attempt to challenge stereotypes and address narratives about the profession.

Participants also talked about the impact visual engagement on social media might have on police recruitment. Several, particularly those from historically excluded social groups in policing, talked about how they use social media to address myths about police diversity. They felt that some citizens wrongly held beliefs that the police service was homogeneous and made up of exclusively white, male, employees. To change these attitudes and assumed myths related to police work, they purposefully posted photographs and videos of some of the ‘backstage’ aspects of policing that are traditionally hidden from the public.

Although a lot of the examples discussed so far involve the outward transmission of information by the police to the public, there were also examples in our data of the police inviting public participation in police work and investigations, and this was facilitated by the publishing of visual tools online. One common example of this is the use of offender ‘mug shots’ with a call for the public to provide information to the police about their whereabouts to help the police find them. Another example is the publishing of CCTV footage to help the police identify suspects. An example of the perceived effectiveness of this method was discussed by one of our police staff participants who worked collaboratively with officers to post information and requests to the public when required:

The big one that we had which I always use as an example, we put out some CCTV footage of a bar brawl in [location removed]. There was about 15 people who were throwing chairs and glasses into each other, all throwing punches, it was absolute chaos . . . We put it on there and loads of people then just started saying, you know, tagging their friends in, saying, ‘Have you seen this?’ It went really, really far. I think it ended up getting millions of views, it was absolutely crazy. But I think it was something like, there was 15 people in the video that they wanted to identify, I think we ended up either identifying all 15 or it was 14 out of the 15, so that was where social media was really powerful. (Interview 1, Police Staff)

Effectiveness here is measured by the number of people identified in the video, but also in terms of the number of views, that it went ‘absolutely viral’. Discernment is needed between posting legitimate images or simply as clickbait to maximise ‘likes’ or re-tweets. The ethics of posting mugshots of those wanted or charged or images of missing persons have been considered before, for instance, regarding the lasting digital footprint of images posted online and the negative impact this might have on those pictured (e.g. Howlings and Solymosi, 2023; Vasigh, 2023).

Humanising police digital interactions

Despite social media providing potential for the police to craft new communication channels and forms of visibility for the public, it is still another example of the increasingly ‘abstract’ nature of police work– where technology is facilitating and in some instances replacing some aspects of police tasks that had historically been conducted in-person (Terpstra et al, 2019; Wells et al., 2023). Participants in this research were very aware of this de-humanisation of policing, voicing concerns about the consequences of the police developing an overly corporate relationship with the public through ‘official’ police accounts; and a fear that the public would become disconnected from the police because they are unaware of who/what sits behind the accounts. In consequence, there were strategies used by police practitioners that drew upon the visual in an attempt to humanise police conduct online.

First, several officers who operated ‘individual’ accounts talked about the benefits of having a profile picture of themselves on their accounts, often in uniform, rather than the generic police crest or stock image, so that the public knew who they were talking to and would also be able to recognise them if they were out conducting police work in the community. This practice was observed by Dekker et al. (2020) when examining the police use of social media in the Netherlands – where formal policy requires those operating police social media accounts to include a profile picture and explicit identification of the officers’ professional credentials in an attempt to enhance the professionalism of police presence online.

Less common, due to fear of professional risk, was the use of visual tools to capture officers off-duty – to show that there is a person behind the uniform. The motivations and perceived benefits of blurring the lines between personal and professional were discussed by one of our police officer participants:

I was never sure how I wanted to post for personal reasons, you know like sharing days off, doing what you do out of work. But I just kept it to a work thing. Then I noticed other people were posting stuff of them doing things on rest days and things like that, and I checked and obviously we are allowed to do that. I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to post regular of what I do in my spare time, but I think every now and again a post of what I do in my spare time, I think it’s quite beneficial’, it shows that we’re not just wearing the uniform and that we do have us own time with family and friends and just shows us as a person, rather than an officer. (Interview 3, Police Officer)

A third visual tool discussed by our participants was the use of emojis, GIFs and visual memes to add a human dimension to text-based communication. Police services may enjoy the exposure that comes from a meme, but the reality is that they often come by accident. A catalogue of emojis and GIFs is commonly integrated into the functionality of the main social media platforms. Such visual tools provide officers and staff with ways to enhance text-based communication through their ability to help convey different types of emotion, such as empathy and humour. Wood (2019) refers to this as policing’s ‘meme strategy’, highlighting how the use of humorous GIFs and visual memes by the police in Australia contributed to the steep rise in public popularity and engagement, albeit in the short term.

In the current research, the use of emojis, GIFs and visual memes was a particularly common practice for those participants who operated ‘official’ or ‘team’ based social media accounts managed by several individuals whose identities are not disclosed/identifiable by the public. One police staff participant who operated the ‘official’ account of their police service talked about their use of emojis as a means to show that there is an actual human behind the digital communication:

I think it’s just putting that personality across. It’s showing how you’re feeling and, you know, by putting a happy face or putting a thumbs up for people who are, you know, supporting us or sharing the post. It just visualises how perhaps the person who’s typing the message is feeling. (Interview 20, Police Staff)

However, participants who engaged in this practice where keen to stress that it was not always appropriate to use these tools and it was dependent on the context of what was to be communicated. In particular, emojis, GIFs and visual memes were seen as a particularly effective neighbourhood policing strategy, but maybe less so in other contexts:

Yes, we do use emojis quite a lot in some of our posts. If it’s something to do with children, we tend to use emojis in that, just to get their attention . . . Yes, I do think the use of emojis is good, because again I think it makes us more relatable and it’s like we’re not just writing words: we’re getting their attention and using the appropriate emojis and making people laugh and things like that. (Interview 6, PCSO)

Challenges of incorporating the visual

The organisational, cultural and individual challenges of police officers translating their practice online are well documented within the existing literature. These include cultural resistance from the dominant rank and file due to the perceived professional risks of engaging with the public online; the lack of suitable technology for officers and staff to access and engage with the public online; and the perception that social media is something that is done as an extra, voluntary part of police duties, without sufficient workload and recognition. These were reoccurring themes in this research – particularly that our participants perceived those officers and staff who were active on social media as still being in the minority; that the IT infrastructure provided by their organisation was very limited in functionality, often requiring them to use their personal devices to edit images and videos; and that there was still a dominant cultural mind-set in policing that social media posed considerable professional risks. These were risks that were engrained in officers about social media as part of their training:

. . . and I think there is a little bit of fear around social media, about getting into trouble really, especially from the younger officers, with official social media kind of stuff. Because you get it drummed into you day after day after day and when you join you only mention that social media is a negative connotation so you’re saying don’t mention you’re a police officer in your personal social media. Don’t do anything you could regret on social media . . . So you kind of become a little bit fearful. (Interview 14, Police Officer)

This fear makes the task of developing an online presence difficult for those who try to produce and utilise visual products, especially original photographs and videos, as they have to consider and negotiate which of their colleagues are happy to be included in these images and who are not. One officer from a mounted branch talked about how they are creative in how they capture different aspects of police work, while maintaining the anonymity of colleagues:

Yes. There is some that literally have no interest at all. There’s one officer that doesn’t like to have his pictures taken so in order to counteract that I take a picture of his horse and tell him to look the other way, or I take a picture at the back of the horse, so there’s ways around it. (Interview 15, Police Officer)

The nature of operational police work also created several legal and ethical questions for those capturing visual products. Despite a perceived consensus among participants that photographs and videos of crime scenes and investigations were well received by the public, there is a need to consider the composition of these visual products to ensure that the police are not disclosing sensitive information. This might be information that could be used in court as evidence, thereby posing a threat to successful prosecutions; but also, information that could reveal to the public and/or suspected criminals about ongoing police investigations. One officer who regularly deals with house raids due to drug offences talked about how he would commonly edit images he captured before posting them on social media:

You might have to blur out numbers on doors, I might have to like cut down pictures, stuff like that . . . so for example if we’re clearing a cannabis farm and I’ve got a picture of the front of the building people are going to know where that is. Now, if people know where that is and there’s still cannabis in the premises that’s going to cause me issues. (Interview 14, Police Officer)

Another PCSO participant talked about their practice of capturing images of police equipment and vehicles to give insights into the public about the nature of police work, without capturing anything that is identifiable:

. . . depending on what the photographs are of. For example, if we do a drugs warrant, I’ll get them to get a photograph of the vans there, but not to make it recognisable of the street, because until this person’s been to court and they’ve been charged, we’re not allowed to put anything on there, but it is nice to get that. We can get photographs without any background in of the equipment used, the officers, things like that. (Interview 6, PCSO)

Despite the ability of visual tools to provide visibility into the more nuanced aspects of police work, there was an acceptance that there were some images that should not be posted online. These included pictures of human fatalities, children and victims of crime.

Discussion and conclusions

Through the presentation and discussion of data collected with police practitioners engaged in the management of police social media accounts, we have drawn attention to the importance placed within the police organisation of being seen online, as well as how this is done by cultivating old and new images of the police. In doing so, this article illustrates that visual tools are looked on with favour by the police because of their potential to capture the attention of the ‘scrolling public’ and thus ensure contemporary police visibility. However, there is also a recognition and, at times, frustration within the police that being seen online is challenging. In the non-digital world, the police may benefit from a degree of cooperation from the public due to the symbolic association of their authority communicated through police artefacts and iconography such as uniforms and equipment (Rowe et al., 2023) – although this is far from guaranteed. However, any authority gained in the physical world is not automatically transferred into the online world. As such, this article has illustrated strategies and practices utilised by the police in pursuit of developing credible forms of digital visibility. Officers and staff have attempted to create this digital visibility through the communication of symbolic meanings incorporated within visual tools, that include visual legacies from policing in the physical world to stand out and communicate authentically and credibility. But, as highlighted, some audiences may have different semiotic readings of the symbols and icons associated with policing, whether in the physical or online world. It cannot be assumed that the curated images of policing posted online will always be read as representations of authenticity and credibility as other factors contribute to interpretation, including prior negative or positive contact with the police and the service’s broader reputation. For example, the iconographic police foot patrol can be represented digitally through the capturing and posting of images and videos of police officers as they engage with communities. But if the audience already has the police in low regard, then even such assumed reassuring images may be read as symbols of control.

Three main examples of new digital visibility were discussed in this article. The first involved the development of an online police ‘brand’ that incorporated visual tools. Some of these activities were new, for example, the use of news banners and coloured filters, so over time, it was hoped that the public would associate the styles and colours used with their local police service. Other activities drew upon more traditional police practices, such as incorporating the police crest on imagery; and incorporating local uniformed officers conducting their police duties within the community in an attempt to transpose some of the signs and symbols that have been historically associated with police symbolic power, legitimacy and visibility into online spaces.

Second, given the increasingly abstract nature of policing, the ways in which police digital imagery on social media could represent new and complementary forms of police visibility has also been a focus of this article. After a sustained period of workforce contraction and at a time when demands on policing are complex and often technologically driven, police work has become even more abstract and more remote from the public (Terpstra et al., 2019). However, we found that social media provides new ways that the police can evidence their work and engage with the community – by capturing and publishing images of themselves in the course of their duties. Some elements of this visual communication are strategic and align to purposeful ‘image work’. Yet, there is a strong motivation to be authentically visible and to use new online platforms to shed light on aspects and realities of police work that have been historically hidden from the public.

Third, given the increasingly digital and disembodied presence of the police, the article sheds light on how visual tools can be used to facilitate dialogue between the police and public and to reassure the public that there are real people behind social media accounts and the information that is being communicated. This included using the functionality of social media platforms to use emojis, GIFs and memes, but also the simple practice of ensuring that police accounts included the image of individual police officers and their professional credentials. This again pointed to an enthusiasm within the police to be seen online. Visual tools were viewed within the police as drawing users in and creating a captive audience who would listen to the police and–hopefully–take action when relied upon. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that meaningful two-way communication remains a challenge for the police given the scale of social media platforms and because there remains few people within the organisation involved in police social media practices.

Despite these growing efforts to develop a new digital visibility, it was clear across participants that embedding social media into police practice is not universal, with many perceiving themselves as mavericks and innovators within their organisations. This was linked to previously highlighted cultural assumptions that police engagement was fraught with risk – both professionally to officers and staff, but also a risk to the fragile relationship between the police and the public – an assumption that one wrong move and reputations could be irrevocably damaged. On top of this general apprehension towards social media, engaging with and producing visual outputs online could be challenging – requiring judgement as to the professional, ethical and legal appropriateness of what is being captured in often challenging and emotive settings.

The advantages facilitated by the use of the visual on social media may outweigh these risks, but the risks – including potentially different semiotic readings of images from audiences who may have poor relations with the police – are not insignificant and should not be ignored by those considering developing a social media presence as part of their professional police practice. To avoid accusations of image management, endeavours to develop new digital visibility must be alongside efforts to understand and address poor public relations with the police where they exist in both online and physical settings.