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Yes_hes_that_guy t1_ivdyk6s wrote

Reply to comment by Perunov in Examining 100,000 crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies between 2010 and 2019, researchers found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates by giuliomagnifico

Crimes that were reported are irrelevant. This compares number of actual arrests to the number of arrests that are reported on the departments’ Facebook pages.

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Perunov t1_ivdzmta wrote

It does not seem to be.

Quote (emphasis mine): > we identify nearly 100,000 posts that report on the race of individuals suspected of or arrested for crimes

So "suspected" is included in addition to arrests. If someone is suspected but arrest is never made, the initial "suspect" post will be counted but it won't result in matching "arrest" record for ethnic counts. Or are they misrepresenting the methodology?

It would be more useful to just compare reported arrest with actual arrest records and see how large the variation is, but then they also mention how unreliable some agencies' reporting on ethnicity is.

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