Crime reporting and engaging : A qualitative study of the polices work and communication within the social media Facebook

The purpose of this study was to understand whether there is a difference in how the Swedish police work with Facebook in two municipalities with different criminal records. The methods used were qualitative interviews with the ones responsible for the Facebook-sites and quantitative content analysis of different Facebook-posts, both from members of the Facebook-site and from the police themselves. Among the theories used in this study were the ”four-step relations process” by Cutlip, Allen and Broom, theory around public relations and theory around the public sphere by Habermas. The results showed that there is a difference in how the police uses Facebook between the municipalities and one of the conclusions is that this is mainly because of the ways that the police choose to work with Facebook rather than the difference in criminal records. Another conclusion is that the police get positive feedback from the members on their Facebook-site, and that how much the police uses Facebook as a tool depends a lot on how much resources they have to spend since the ones writing on Facebook are policemen and policewomen, and that the police do not have someone who works with the Facebook-site as a primary task. Keywords: Facebook, police, social media, qualitative interviews, quantitative content analysis, authority, public relations