criminal justice

The Relationship Between Social Media Data and Crime Rates in the United States Wang, Yan 1  

  ; Yu, Wenchao 1 ; Liu, Sam 2 ; Young, Sean D 1 1 University of California, Los Angeles, USA 2 University

of Victoria, Canada . Social Media + Society ; Thousand Oaks  Vol. 5, Iss. 1,  (Jan 2019).

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ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) Crime monitoring tools are needed for public health and law enforcement officials to deploy appropriate resources

and develop targeted interventions. Social media, such as Twitter, has been shown to be a feasible tool for

monitoring and predicting public health events such as disease outbreaks. Social media might also serve as a

feasible tool for crime surveillance. In this study, we collected Twitter data between May and December 2012 and

crime data for the years 2012 and 2013 in the United States. We examined the association between crime data and

drug-related tweets. We found that tweets from 2012 were strongly associated with county-level crime data in both

2012 and 2013. This study presents preliminary evidence that social media data can be used to help predict future

crimes. We discuss how future research can build upon this initial study to further examine the feasibility and

effectiveness of this approach. DETAILS

Subject: Social networks; Mass media; Public health; Data; Law enforcement; Crime; Criminal

statistics; Health problems; Social media; Surveillance

Location: United States--US

Identifier / keyword: social media; Twitter; substance abuse; crime; county

URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119834585

Publication title: Social Media + Society; Thousand Oaks

Volume: 5

Issue: 1

Publication year: 2019

Publication date: Jan 2019

Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.

Place of publication: Thousand Oaks

Country of publication: United Kingdom, Thousand Oaks

Database copyright  2022 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest

Publication subject: Sociology

e-ISSN: 20563051

Source type: Scholarly Journal

Language of publication: English

Document type: Journal Article

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119834585

ProQuest document ID: 2313790273

Document URL: https://aiuniv.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-

journals/relationship-between-social-media-data-crime/docview/2313790273/se-2

Copyright: © The Author(s) 2019. This work i s licensed under the Creative Commons  

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http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (the “License”).

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Last updated: 2020-07-12

Database: ProQuest One Academic