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Introduction
On Saturday, August 26, 2017, Hurricane Harvey descended upon Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in the USA. Days of record setting rain resulted in over 50 deaths in the metropolitan area, thousands were stranded with one third of the city underwater and billions of dollars in damage. While local officials reported that over 56,000 cases of 9-1-1 calls were made, citizens also turned to social media for asking rescues and help (Rhodan, 2017). While steadily growing, not enough work has focused on how police departments (PD) leverage social media to communicate with the public during times of crisis in emergency or mass convergence events. We seek to expand this burgeoning area of research adopting a framework of crisis informatics to situate our analysis. Crisis informatics is simultaneously an interdisciplinary field of study, and a framework for viewing contemporary crisis and mass emergency events. Hagar (2006) broadly defined crisis informatics as a field that examines “the interconnectedness of people, organizations, information, and technology during crises” (p.10). Crisis informatics also considers a full life cycle of disaster events including the preparedness, response and recovery phases, which influenced data collection and analysis in this study. We leverage crisis informatics as lens to critically examine: how information production and dissemination evolves during the phases of a crisis event, and an information environment when traditional “technology infrastructure breaks down” (Hagar, 2006).
In this paper, we investigate the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public engagement on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey by applying the framework of crisis informatics. We address four fundamental questions:
What types of informational content was shared between HPD and the public?
What social network patterns evolved within @Houstonpolice network?
Was the formation of clusters in the @Houstonpolice network observed? If so, what were the main topical interests in those clusters?
Did @Houstonpolice serve as an alternative 9-1-1 emergency dispatch?
The HPD is one of the largest police agencies in the USA, with over 5,000 sworn officers, and patrols a jurisdiction of over 2m citizens and an area of 601.7 square miles (1,560 km2). The department launched its Twitter account in 2010, and maintains an active social media presence via a blog, YouTube channel, Facebook and Instagram accounts. We present the literature review...