Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter

Taeho Kim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2022, vol. 112, 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.

JEL-codes: D12 H76 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20221101

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