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Analysis of Tweets Shows Disapproval of Police

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday August 26 2015, @08:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the Who-LiveStream's-the-Watchmen? dept.

kurenai.tsubasa writes:

The Root reports that “Almost half of Americans hate their police department:”

[DrugAbuse.com] examined over 766,000 tweets about sentiment toward law enforcement in each state. The state with the most positive perception of police was New Hampshire. The most negative: Arkansas. The city with the most positive perception of police was Columbus, Ohio, while the one with the most negative was, not surprisingly, Ferguson, Mo. Other “failing” city police departments included Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, New York and Denver. Baltimore, a city still reeling from recent unrest, received a D grade….

“If you talk to young people in Baltimore, I don’t think their feelings about police have changed at all in the last five to seven years,” says [Philip Leaf, a Johns Hopkins University professor]. “There has been a negative perception of police in many communities for a long time. There just haven’t been conversations with these young people or in the media about it until recently. There hasn’t been an upsurge of disconnect with the police. With cellphones, there has been documentation of things that people have been talking about for a long time. People haven’t been believed, and now it’s hard not to believe it, if you see it on TV.…”

“It’s not as if this stuff hasn’t been going on all along for decades, but now it’s being captured for the world to see, and the few bad apples being captured on camera are ruining the entire tree of law enforcement,” says Hassan Giordano, 39, and a candidate for Baltimore City Council. “However, those very same people who have a negative opinion of police will also be the same ones calling 911 when they find themselves in an unsafe situation. It’s a catch-22.”

It's important to note that on the graphs shown in the article, even an A grade represents negative sentiment.

More data and a description of the methodology are available at DrugAbuse.com, including graphs of tweet sentiment involving alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. DrugAbuse.com used the commercial IBM service AlchemyAPI to analyze the tweets.

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:59PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:59PM (#228287) Journal

    Regarding your last point: http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/08/26/family-releases-video-of-police-killing-their-mentally-ill-son/ [nationofchange.org]

    The family of a mentally ill man released a video this week depicting Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputies shooting their son to death. Instead of attempting to calm down the schizophrenic young man, deputies immediately escalated the situation by repeatedly shooting him with a Taser, hitting him with batons, and pepper-spraying his face. Although the sheriff’s department claims that the mentally ill man rammed a police car and pinned a deputy’s legs between his vehicle and a patrol car, witnesses assert that the department lied in order to justify the shooting.

    Days after losing his job, 31-year-old John Berry drove to the Lakewood home that he shared with his mother and siblings on July 6. Instead of going inside the house, Berry remained in his car while his older brother went out to talk to him. Chris Berry, a federal police officer who works at a facility with two psychiatric hospitals, realized his younger brother appeared to be off his medication and had not slept in days.

    Concerned for his younger sibling, Chris Berry called the sheriff’s department to request a mental health team to help his brother. Chris Berry was informed that a mental health team could not be dispatched until patrol deputies assessed him first.

    According to Chris Berry, the deputies who arrived immediately began acting aggressively toward his brother and rapidly escalated the situation. Family members and neighbors helplessly watched as deputies pepper-sprayed Berry in the face, repeatedly shot him with a Taser, and viciously beat him with metal batons. Chris Berry recalled his brother looking stunned and asking, “What did I do wrong?”

    A neighbor captured a video on her cell phone of several deputies surrounding Berry’s car and hitting him. Berry remains in the driver’s seat of his car as his neighbor can be heard repeatedly shouting, “Stop beating him!”

    As neighbors and family members plead with Berry to get out of his car, two deputies aggressively whip out their metal batons and extend them in a threatening manner. Before the deputies can hit him again, Berry puts his car in reverse. The neighbor recording the incident momentarily looks away as deputies gun down Berry.

    He was pronounced dead at the scene.

    A few hours after the incident, Homicide Bureau Lt. Eddie Hernandez justified the shooting by claiming that Berry had injured a deputy’s legs by pinning him between Berry’s vehicle and a patrol car. In a follow-up statement on Monday, sheriff’s spokeswoman Nicole Nishida asserted that Berry had driven his vehicle head-on into a responding patrol car before the start of the video. But according to witnesses, Berry never rammed a patrol car with his vehicle and was killed after a deputy fell down beside the cars.


    “They said he accelerated and crashed into the police car. That did not happen — I was there for the whole thing,” Chris Berry stated. “But they have to say that because it justifies their aggressive actions.”

    Conflicted in his roles as both a law enforcement officer and an older brother, Chris Berry became overwhelmed with emotion when he told reporters, “I called one brother to help another brother and…”

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:05PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:05PM (#228292) Journal

    That video is so fucked up. Pigs -- the lot of them. It's things like this make me feel as much sympathy for the cops I hear about getting killed in the line of duty, as I feel when I hear about some violent gang-banger getting killed in the line of his duty.

    • (Score: 2) by zugedneb on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:03PM

      by zugedneb (4556) on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:03PM (#228605)

      holy shit...
      what a fucked up nation...
      in other parts of the world, they have generations old conflicts/poverty/criminality, so they have an excuse...
      but only in US get random people executed like this...

      --
      old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax