Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities
Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis
Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter
HICSS '09 Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work
Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work
Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter
HICSS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Twitter use by the U.S. Congress
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Tweeting disaster: hashtag constructions and collisions
Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing
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In this paper, we examine the use of Twitter by city police departments in large U.S. cities (cities with populations greater than 300,000). The purpose of our study is to determine what types of information are shared by city police departments over Twitter and to determine how the public uses the information shared to converse with the police departments and with each other. We read and analyzed 4,915 posts authored by 30 city police departments that have active Twitter accounts. The analysis shows that city police departments in large U.S. cities primarily use Twitter to disseminate crime and incident related information. City police departments also use Twitter to share information about their departments, events, traffic, safety awareness, and crime prevention. To a lesser extent, city police departments use Twitter to converse directly with the public and news media. We also sampled four weeks of public-authored tweets, totaling 1,984 tweets, that contained police department Twitter usernames and found that a majority of these tweets were retweets of police authored tweets; public-authored tweets also mentioned police departments in discussions or were used to send direct messages. This paper furthers our understanding of information sharing by city police departments as well as public redistribution of this information through the use of social media tools.