Law enforcement agency adoption and use of Twitter as a crisis communication tool

This chapter describes the results of a research study investigating the adoption and use of Twitter as a crisis communication tool by law enforcement agencies from large US cities (cities with populations greater than 300,000). The study consisted of two parts – an analysis of Twitter use based on publicly available posts authored by 30 law enforcement agencies that have active Twitter accounts and an analysis of data collected through 17 semi-structured interviews with law enforcement public information officers and public media specialists.