The Relationship Between Social Media Data and Crime Rates in the United States

Crime monitoring tools are needed for public health and law enforcement officials to deploy appropriate resources and develop targeted interventions. Social media, such as Twitter, has been shown to be a feasible tool for monitoring and predicting public health events such as disease outbreaks. Social media might also serve as a feasible tool for crime surveillance. In this study, we collected Twitter data between May and December 2012 and crime data for the years 2012 and 2013 in the United States. We examined the association between crime data and drug-related tweets. We found that tweets from 2012 were strongly associated with county-level crime data in both 2012 and 2013. This study presents preliminary evidence that social media data can be used to help predict future crimes. We discuss how future research can build upon this initial study to further examine the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach.