Police Reform Can Start On Twitter

[Commentary] From July 2015 through August 2016, I interviewed dozens of New York Police Department (NYPD) leaders and employees, many anonymously, in an attempt to fully document the department’s adoption of Twitter and other online platforms. (The full case study was published by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.)

This adoption was a transformative move for the department and an attempt to balance crime prevention and community outreach — an effort, as NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said, to shift the police mindset from “warrior” to guardian.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Berkman Center.]