LAUSR

The enduring reality of racial residential segregation in the United States means that White Americans oftentimes live within neither eyesight nor earshot of policing’s most aggressive tactics (1, 2). Instead, they form perceptions of public safety as consumers of news, television, and other sources that whet penal appetites (3). In PNAS, Grunwald et al. (4) direct our attention to a new source of information with the potential to shape public understanding of race and crime: police’s very own social media pages. In the past 16 years, the percentage of American adults who report that they use at least one social media site has multiplied by nearly 16-fold (5). Like any other entity, policing agencies have thus increasingly turned to social media in pursuit of the online outreach and digital engagement that modernizing organizations crave. But police are not like any other organization. Grunwald et al. show how policing agencies use social media as state media in ways that can reinforce perceptions of Black criminality. They offer three main findings based on an analysis of all Facebook posts from nearly 14,000 law enforcement agencies in America. First, policing agencies overreport Black suspects relative to local arrest statistics on nearly all crime categories. Black suspects were identified in 32% of race crime posts but represented only 20% of arrestees. Second, Facebook users were exposed to posts overrepresenting Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates, which spanned both violent crimes and property crimes. Third, overexposure was the most intense in the Midwest and some of the South and mid-Atlantic regions and lowest in Hawaii and the Black Belt. It also increased with the share of Republican voters in the county and in counties with fewer Black residents. Grunwald et al.’s research is agenda-setting. The findings direct us to investigate how notions of racialized criminality permeate organizational decision-making in policing agencies, especially through routine practices that are seemingly race-neutral. Racialized policing emerges not just through street-level law enforcement but also online content production where the systematic omission of race may be as consequential as its identification. The findings thus call into question whether the state’s coercive arm needs to be publicly active in releasing information on social media in the first place. The research does not “merely” advance our understanding of police inequality; it shows how the blue line is redrawing the color line in the 21st century.