This book’s main message is that police agencies can, through social media, manage their image, bolster their legitimacy with the public, and foster closer bonds with the communities they serve. They can do so by supplementing traditional community-oriented policing with what the authors call "electronic community-oriented policing," or E-COP. This provides greater opportunity for two-way police-public interactive communication that benefits both sides. While E-COP can be a tool in crime fighting, the authors focus more on identifying best practices the police can employ to communicate more effectively with the people they protect and serve. The authors predict that E-COP will become one of the main policing strategies worldwide. They base their suggestions for improving police use of social media on their own study, which analyzed Facebook posts published by US police departments. . . this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in criminal justice and police studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

Choice Reviews

As one who has been reading, writing, and researching Community-Oriented Policing since the late 1980s, I have seen it change over the years, moving from the innovation generation in the 1980s, to diffusion in the 1990s, and institutionalization in the 2000s, but had no way of conceptualizing modern Community-Oriented Policing; that is at least until now. Lovrich and Hu not only introduce the next generation in their appropriately titled book Electronic Community-Oriented Policing: Theories, Contemporary Efforts, and Future Directions, but they use a mixed-methods approach to demonstrate all the complexities of modern Community-Oriented Policing. If you are looking for a book to understand Community-Oriented Policing today, this is the book to read.

Willard M. Oliver, Sam Houston State University

Police strategies around social media practices have emerged over much of the last decade yet there remain a limited number of studies that have examined police practices on social media. This book provides an exploratory study of one side of police use of social media by focusing largely on Facebook. Employing a multi-disciplinary perspective and mixed methods approach, Xiaochen Hu and Nicholas Lovrich provide important insights into some contemporary developments in virtual policing, or electronic community-oriented policing (E-COP). This timely book sets out agendas for police practices on social media and future research into E-COP, which will continue to develop and expand into a core policing strategy. This book will be of great interest to police practitioners at all levels, scholars as well as students in psychology, sociology, and mass communication, and the general public.

Christopher J. Schneider, Brandon University, author of Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media

While social media have become a central topic in social inquiry, the implications of such communication channels for criminal justice have yet to be thoroughly explored. In this careful and rigorous study, Hu and Lovrich address this gap and offer an innovative account of police use of social media. They develop and deploy a concept – that of E-COP – to explore they ways that social media are impacting and reshaping community-oriented policing and public engagement with criminal justice and law enforcement. The resulting book offers an important new development in our understanding of criminal justice and new media, and promises to help guide the engagement of law enforcement actors with citizens in the digital age. It is highly recommended for students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers interested in the future of policing.

Majid Yar, Lancaster University

In politics, culture, and personal interactions new media have become the dominant communication channels. Along with other institutions the police have been swept up in this media tide, but the roots, impacts, and implications of this shift have not been discussed in a coherent way. Therefore, Electronic Community-Oriented Policing by Xiaochen Hu and Nicholas Lovrich is a needed and welcome addition to the police-media literature. In this research-grounded, thoroughly referenced work, the authors move beyond the common speculations regarding new media effects on law enforcement that dominate the literature. In contrast, they employ recent research and how various police agencies actually use social media to develop a rigorous model of the emerging police-social media interactions. Grounding their work in the historical roots of community-oriented policing and culling ideas from mass media and communications theories, they have crafted the contemporary concept of “electronic community-oriented policing” which blends the historical trends in policing with the effects of new media on law enforcement. This book will be valuable to researchers, students, and practitioners who wish to better understand social media’s effects and their potential for improving police community relations. Their effort fills an enormous gap in the policing literature and could not have been written at a better time.

Ray Surette, University of Central Florida

This book provides a timely addition to the scholarship on policing in the context of 21st century 24/7 connectivity, smart phones and devices, and online communities. In particular it looks at the prospects of what the authors call E-COP, Electronic Community Orientated Policing. Hu and Lovrich suggest that policing is moving quickly into a period where community orientated policing is moving online – with variations on the themes of traditional COP. The concept is backed up by the findings of a number of empirical studies, inter-alia thematising and analyzing police use of various kinds of electronic (social) media. The book not only situates itself in this empirical context, but also provides a philosophical basis for the theory. Whether or not E-COP is ever completely and competently realized by police organizations, we’ll need to wait and see. However, the book provides a compelling case that it should be, and a roadmap as to how it can operate. It’s a book you would hope senior police would read.

Murray Lee, The University of Sydney