Stanford's Julian Nyarko Researches Effects of Calling Out Black Suspects by Police …

As more Americans get their news from social media, how that news is reported is more important than ever. A new paper co-authored by Julian Nyarko, “Police Agencies on Facebook Overreport on Black Suspects,” looked at 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies, focusing on how they write about crime and how often they identify suspects and those arrested as Black. Here, Associate Professor of Law Nyarko discusses key takeaways from the study. How much data did you gather for the study? We started with approximately 16,000 departments that report UCR data [the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report] and ultimately matched about 14,000 of them to their Facebook page. From there, we looked at close to 100,000 crime reports made by these agencies in the form of Facebook posts. Can you talk about the key conclusion, that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects? Yes. We first look at overreporting. Overreporting is the proportion of Black suspects in the reports versus the proportion of Black suspects in the arrest statistic. According to this measure, Black suspects are overrepresented by 12 percentage points. But rather than focusing only on overreporting, we’re looking at overexposure as well. The
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