27 New Zealand Police Facebook Posts That Changed Government Social Media

Funny police social media has existed in pockets across various platforms, but the New Zealand Police have achieved something that most institutional accounts never manage, which is a consistent voice that is recognizably theirs across every post regardless of subject matter. The seatbelt message is different every week. The animal content is different every week. The pun orientation is different every week. But the tone — warm, slightly unhinged, fully committed to the bit, aware that the bit is a bit — remains identical, and that consistency is what distinguishes a genuinely funny account from an account that occasionally gets lucky. This is not occasional luck. This is a philosophy.

The most remarkable thing about the NZ Police Facebook strategy is not the jokes. It is the reach those jokes have achieved on behalf of content that is, at its core, road safety information. Stop signs and speed limits and seatbelt compliance are not traditionally considered engaging content categories. They do not tend to generate shares. They do not tend to generate the kind of affectionate commentary that builds a community around a page. And yet here we are, in a world where people screenshot a police department’s use of Comic Sans to make a point about distracted driving and send it to their friends, who then share it, and the road safety message travels embedded inside the joke like a vaccine inside a piece of cheese. The cheese is a pun about sheep. The vaccine is “buckle up.” The sheep are real.

What the account has also understood, and what most institutional accounts miss entirely, is that the animals are not a distraction from the message. The animals are the message, in the sense that they create the relationship between the account and its audience that makes the safety information land rather than scroll past. A kitten sitting inside a police hat is not an advertisement for road safety. But the person who stops scrolling for the kitten is now in a conversation with the New Zealand Police, and the conversation is warm, and the next post in their feed might be about indicator use, and they are now significantly more likely to read it than they would have been if the kitten had never been in the hat. This is not accident. This is strategy. The kitten was always load-bearing.