Disparities in Police Crime Reports on Social Media

Disparities in Police Crime Reports on Social Media, a conversation with Julian Nyarko, moderated by Nathaniel Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.
A large and growing share of the American public turns to Facebook for news. On this platform, reports about crime increasingly come directly from law enforcement agencies, raising questions about content curation. We gathered all posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by US law enforcement agencies, focusing on reporting about crime and race. We found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25 percentage points relative to local arrest rates. This overexposure occurs across crime types and geographic regions and increases with the proportion of both Republican voters and non-Black residents. Widespread exposure to overreporting risks reinforcing racial stereotypes about crime and exacerbating punitive preferences among the polity more generally.
About the Speaker:
Julian Nyarko is an Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where he examines how new computational methods can be used to study questions of legal and social scientific importance. He is particularly interested in the use of natural language processing to study large legal corpora, such as contracts or statutes. He also frequently collaborates with other researchers on projects across a diverse group of subjects, including causal inference, algorithmic fairness and criminal justice.