Replication Data for: Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter

Data/code files for the following project: I study the viability of Twitter-based measures for measuring public attitudes about the police. I find that Twitter-based measures track Gallup's measure of public attitudes starting around 2014, when Twitter user base stabilized, but not before 2014. Increases in Black Lives Matter protests are also associated with increases in negative sentiment measures from Twitter. The findings suggest that Twitter-based measures can be used to acquire granular evaluations of police performance, but they can be more useful in analyzing panel data of multiple agencies over time than in tracking a single geographical area over time.