What was in those posts?

The first post that really struck me was a meme that I have seen numerous times since, that shows a police dog being restrained by an officer with its teeth bared, raring to chase after something. And the caption is, “I hope you run, he likes fast food.”

If there was one, that was the image that made me think: I want to know how widespread this is.

And maybe it was the fact that it was a meme. I’m almost positive that that guy didn’t create that meme, right; he got it from somewhere. And how many officers came by that meme and shared it? I still don’t know the answer to that question.

How did you do the project?

The goal was to take a systemic look at a small number of departments. We went and got the roster, the publicly available roster of all the police officers in those jurisdictions.

Then we searched Facebook for folks that had the same name and location as folks on the rosters. Obviously, that wasn’t enough — there are a whole lot of people with each of those names — so when we got a person who appeared to be an officer, we took that profile and looked specifically for some sort of verifying information.

The most common piece of verifying information was simply, “works at Philadelphia Police Department,” “works at Dallas Police Department.” A lot of people didn’t list an employer. For those folks, the next most common way we verified someone was with a picture of that officer in uniform.

We made a list of all the people we verified, and we reviewed all of the public posts made by those people.

What were the criteria you used to determine whether or not a particular post or comment should be flagged?