Psychological effects of urban crime gleaned from social media

Abstract

Exposure to frequent crime incidents has been found to have a negative bearing on the well-being of city residents, even if they are not themselves a direct victim. We pursue the re-search question of whether naturalistic data shared on Twit-ter may provide a "lens" to understand changes in psycho-logical attributes of urban communities (1) immediately fol-lowing crime incidents, as well as (2) due to long-term ex-posure to crime. We analyze half a million Twitter posts from the City of Atlanta in 2014, where the rate of violent crime is three times of the national average. In a first study, we develop a statistical method to detect changes in social media psychological attributes in the immediate aftermath of a crime event. Second, we develop a regression model that uses historical (yearlong) crime to predict Twitter nega-tive emotion, anxiety, anger, and sadness. We do not find significant changes in social media affect immediately fol-lowing crime in Atlanta. However we do observe significant ability of historical crime to account for heightened negative emotion and anger in the future. Our findings have implica-tions in gauging the utility of social media to infer longitu-dinal and population-scale patterns of urban well-being.