About This Project

Facebook as a Platform for Community Policing: a quantitative analysis

Research Project
Ongoing

ABSTRACT

This research project is building on two qualitative studies conducted in the context of Mexico to better understand data practices of NGOs and citizens when working towards social change (see Conference paper 5 and 6).

In our project, we are focusing on Facebook Pages which are working as a place that enables citizens in Mexico to report and publicly display stories and experiences about crimes that would otherwise go unreported. These pages allow users to report local incidents with some degree of anonymity, reducing the burden of retaliation from authorities.

Using quantitative methods we analyze the content of posts, as well as overall group metadata such as a number of posts and comments, and volume of interactions such as shares and likes.
We focused on an entire year’s worth of data from a relevant selection of Facebook pages. We first collect and categorize posts from these Facebook pages. Then, using those posts, we calculated summary statistics of crime and analyze the sentiment and content of user comments. Finally, we compare our results to other crime reports, including official ones. To preserve the integrity of the posts to the greatest extent possible we retained the dataset of posts in the original Spanish language format for the duration of our data analysis.
Additionally, we classified the posts about crime and compare them to official reports, in order to gain insight into whether the crimes that go unreported or uninvestigated are represented on these pages.