A recent study shows that police agencies’ official social-media posts display racial bias and may help perpetuate stereotypes about who commits certain crimes
of Americans think the country’s police forces “operate in racist ways”, according to surveys by YouGov, a pollster. As well as high-profile cases, independent investigations and studies have brought attention to racial disparities in the actions of police forces. .
The authors—Ben Grunwald, Julian Nyarko and John Rappaport, of Duke, Stanford and Chicago law schools—gathered posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages belonging to America’s local law-enforcement agencies. The authors used an algorithm designed by researchers at Stanford University to find posts about crimes that also identified the suspect by race. They then compared the frequency of these posts with information on actual arrest rates by the same police departments between 2010 and 2019.
The authors’ research focussed on posts about black suspects. Of posts mentioning a suspect’s race 32% mentioned a black person, despite black people accounting for only 20% of arrests. Black suspects were over-represented in all posts about serious crime with the exception of car theft . For violent crimes, such as rape and murder, black suspects were mentioned in police Facebook posts 40% more often than they should have been.
The authors then examined whether this racial skew was reflected in what Americans saw on social media. They aggregated data across counties from all police departments reporting arrest information, assuming that people would see more posts from their local forces than from those farther away. The researchers found that Facebook users in counties that voted Republican in the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 were likely to see the most over-reporting of black suspects .
There are instances where knowing the race of a suspect could be useful for the public. Such information could help the police find dangerous suspects-at-large. But black suspects were still vastly over-represented in posts about recent arrests. About one-third of Americans use Facebook as a regular source of news. None of them is served well by police forces that reinforce racial stereotypes.
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