Social Media Research and Policing

Abstract

The paper reviews academic literature which is relevant to the better understanding of the police use of social media. It concludes that much of the practitioner literature has focussed on issues of adoption. Academic work has supported this in its focus on authorisation and legitimacy. Other research has looked to use social media as a source of big data in support of predicting social trends and operationally significant shifts in public behaviour. This is inherently problematic, as social media researchers in other fields have shown.