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Social media offers numerous opportunities to companies, organizations and government agencies to communicate with people outside their organization, to promote their interests and to better serve their customers, or as in the case with government agencies, to better serve their citizens. However, little is known about how police departments in particular use social media. This research study explores why police departments use social media, how they manage their social media tools, and the problems and challenges experienced as they use social media. This qualitative study is largely guided by grounded theory. The data were collected from a study population using local police departments in the Dallas-Fort worth (DFW) area principal cities using both individual interviews with police departments’ social media officers and observations of these departments’ online social media tools (in particular, Facebook and Twitter). This study has shown that the DFW area city police departments are using social media quite extensively to keep the public informed and often for investigative purposes. There are some success factors to adopting and using these tools, such as the motivation of department staff and their benefits, successful implementation of the tools, the simplicity of using tools and that it is absolutely free.

The problem of this study was to determine how well the public information office of the Dallas Police Department performed in three public relations areas: staff consultation, employee communication, and press relations. Interviews were conducted with the command staff of the Dallas Police Department and with nine mass media representatives who had regular contact with both the police department and the public information office. Their answers were compared with public relations principles taken from literature in both the general public relations and the police public relations fields to see if the public information office was succeeding or failing in performing its staff-consultation, employee-communication, and press-relations functions.

In this thesis work, I examine the use and adoption of online communication media by 840 fire and police departments that were affected by the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. I began by exploring how and why these fire and police departments used (or did not use) online media to communicate with the public during Hurricane Sandy. Results show that fire and police departments used online media during Hurricane Sandy to give timely and relevant information to the public about things such as evacuations, damages, weather, and cleanup and to engage in two-way communications with their constituents. In their messages, fire and police departments sought to make the information provided more credible by referencing, rebroadcasting, and recommending other authoritative entities. Though some departments saw online media as a useful and effective means of communication with members of the public, other departments found them difficult to use given the challenging circumstances of Hurricane Sandy such as flooding and power outages. Next, I explore how a large-scale disaster event like Hurricane Sandy affects online media adoption by affected fire and police departments. I found an increase in online activity over Facebook, Twitter, and Nixle by the affected fire and police departments compared to before Hurricane Sandy. However, it is unclear whether this increase in online activity can be attributed to Hurricane Sandy or a natural increase over time.

United States federal law regulating leaves of absence for maternity-related purposes pales in comparison to other nations' policies, an observation only recently receiving attention from political scientists. Providing an understanding of how maternity leave is handled by individual organizations in the United States only, a quantitative study is conducted that examines local variation in policy formulation. Employee leave due to maternity is primarily a women's issue and its treatment will vary depending on the socio-political context that the policy dictating the leave is found in. Three main determinants of a policy's level of comprehensiveness are identified as being the political representation of women on local legislative bodies, the bureaucratic representation of women in their place of employment, and the level of women's movement activity in the community. Moreover, the gendered context of the organization is considered by comparing two historically distinct institutions on the gender continuum, public education and law enforcement. After analysis involving a national comparison of public school district and police department maternity leave policies, it was found that the presence of the women's movement in a community significantly impacts the dependent variable, policy comprehensiveness. The effects of political and bureaucratic representation, however, seem to differ between police departments and school districts. In consideration of the most comprehensive policies found, it seems police departments are highly influenced by larger proportions of women officers whereas women teachers might be at a disadvantage precisely because of their over-representation in school districts. Seemingly counterintuitive, this finding suggests that gendered institutions are predicated on more than just women's presence. Evidence that maternity leave policy in individual U.S. institutions is a product of the gendered culture of the organization was found by observing the differential impact of political and social variables on police departments and school districts.

During the last 25 years in law enforcement in the United States, there has been a universal practice of foot and/or bicycle patrols used to accomplish the goal of police patrol enforcement and the philosophy of community policing in metropolitan areas. These tactics of patrol have also been used in police departments in and around the State of Texas. This report is a research project on six major metropolitan police departments in the State of Texas, analyzing their allocation of foot and/or bicycle patrol units within their urban cities. The study assesses their early history in using these two police tactics to address criminal activity and their progression from foot patrol to bicycle patrol. The findings of this research support the proposition that major Texas police departments have adopted the practices and philosophies of other major urban police departments around the US, by using foot and/or bicycle patrols in their cities. There is evidence that major Texas police departments were using foot patrol during the early 1980s in support of community policing and gradually phased out this practice in the early 1990s to adopt the new enforcement tactic of policing on a bicycle.

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