Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter
AEA Papers and Proceedings
vol. 112,
May 2022
(pp. 184-87)
Abstract
I study the viability of Twitter-based measures for measuring public attitudes about the police. I find that Twitter-based measures track Gallup's measure of public attitudes toward the police starting around 2014, when the Twitter user base stabilized, but not before 2014. Increases in Black Lives Matter protests are also associated with increases in negative sentiment measures from Twitter. The findings suggest that Twitter-based measures can be used to acquire granular evaluations of police performance, but they are more useful in analyzing panel data of multiple agencies over time rather than in tracking a single geographical area over time.Citation
Kim, Taeho. 2022. "Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 112: 184-87. DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20221101Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D12 Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
- H76 State and Local Government: Other Expenditure Categories
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- K42 Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law