Sensing the public's reaction to crime news using the 'Links Correspondence Method'

Public media such as TV or newspapers, paired with crime statistics from the authority, raise awareness of crimes within society. However, in today's digital society, other sources rapidly gain importance as well. The Internet and social networks act heavily as information distribution platforms. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the influence of the social Web service Twitter as an information distribution platform for crime news. In order to detect messages with crime-related contents, the Links Correspondence Method (LCM) is introduced, which gathers and investigates Twitter messages related to crime articles via associated Web links. Detected crime tweets are analysed in regard to the distance between the location of an incident and the location of associated tweets, as well as regards demographic aspects of the corresponding crime news. The results show that there exists a spatial dependency regarding the activity space of a user (and the crime-related tweets of this user) and the actual location of the crime incident. Furthermore, the demographic analysis indicates that the type of a crime as well as the gender of the victim has great influence on whether the crime incident is spread via Twitter or not.