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Introduction
In the social media age, practices of police image management have moved online. Like many large organizations, police now attempt to curate public views of their work using Twitter and Facebook (Wood, 2020; Bullock, 2018; Meijer and Thaens, 2013). Nearly all police services across the USA have adopted social media and there are multiple kinds of messages posted on police social media pages (Hu et al., 2018). Public police in Canada are no exception to this trend of social media use by criminal justice agencies. It is crucial to investigate how public police are using social media. Twitter posts (tweets) made by police not only contain information about police work but also community events, youth programs and fund-raising initiatives. Since social media messaging shapes public opinion, research is needed to examine the meanings of these communications.
Not all police social media communications are about accidents or missing persons. Public police now engage in philanthropy and depict these efforts in digital realms using visual media. We define philanthropic work as police departments, associations and foundations engaging in events and work to promote the welfare of the general public and raise funds for community groups. While representations of police brutality such as incidents of choking (i.e. George Floyd and Eric Garner) or shooting (i.e. Matthew Dumas and Tamir Rice) often go viral, charitable actions by police are intended to demonstrate they still care about people. We examine social media communications about police philanthropy to assess the manifest and latent meanings encoded.
There is a literature study on the agendas that lead to philanthropic giving and fundraising by large organizations (Eikenberry and Mirabella, 2018; Goss, 2016; Farrell, 2015; Wilson, 2014), revealing that motivations for giving or fundraising are not purely altruistic. The goal of philanthropy is to capitalize on social connections or to benefit from the association with the donee or the act of giving (Nickel, 2018; Kuldova, 2018; McGoey, 2012; la Cour and Kromann, 2011). Large organizations turn to social media to advertise their philanthropic work to boost their public perception and legitimacy (Guo and Saxton, 2018). As Bornstein (2009) noted, the impulse of philanthropy or charity is almost always to boost social or cultural capital. Philanthropy creates a set of shadow relations whereby the...