Maintaining neutrality: A sentiment analysis of police agency Facebook pages before and after a fatal officer-involved shooting of a citizen

Increased attention to and scrutiny of fatal police shootings across the U.S. is often credited to the rise of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which provide a platform for citizens to publicly engage with police agencies. On its face, this type of citizen engagement appears to realize the promise of social media in the public sector to increase agency accountability, transparency, and legitimacy. However, research suggests that police agencies primarily use social media as a way to manage their public image, rather than for citizen engagement. In addition, the degree to which citizens use social media to hold police agencies accountable is unclear. We examined both sides by analyzing the emotional tone (sentiment) of over 350,000 police agency Facebook posts and user comments after a fatal officer-involved shooting of a citizen in 2016. On average, police agency posts were decidedly neutral in tone and did not change in the post-shooting time period, suggesting they did not post more positive content after the shooting in an attempt to bolster their public image. While user comments were more negative compared to pre-shooting levels, on average, the magnitude of the change was small, essentially neutral, and increased almost to pre-shooting levels very quickly. We also found small differences in user comment sentiment based on the race and armed status of the victim, but not in the expected direction. The findings provide evidence about how police agencies and users react to a police shooting on Facebook and raises critical questions about the ability of social media to serve as a meaningful tool for citizen engagement and accountability. •On average, police agencies post neutral content on their Facebook pages.•User comments after a police shooting are also neutral on average.•Small differences in sentiment by race of the victim and armed status were evident.•The promise of social media for meaningful citizen engagement is under question.