A professional perspective of persuasion: An analysis of police and prosecutor perspectives and experiences with social media's effect on eyewitness testimony

Every day, people across the country log onto Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other forms of public communication to get the latest information on significant events happening in their communities. One of the more newsworthy categories is often crime stories. For those who have witnessed a crime, turning to social media can become a form of influence that can affect their statement to the police and in court. This study takes a qualitative approach to examine themes consistent with social media’s influence on eyewitness testimony. The project accomplished this by conducting six in-depth interviews with three police officers and three prosecutors. All the police officers were employed in the RCMP Major Crimes division, with two being part of the interview team at one point in their careers. Two prosecutors worked as trial crown council members for the BC Prosecution Service for most of their law careers. The last decided to keep their affiliations confidential. Five themes were discovered during the study. These themes included social media’s status as neither good nor bad, eyewitnesses’ decreasing importance in court, social media’s impact on how participants talk with witnesses, the case-by-case nature of everything in the justice system and the differing definitions of social media.