Conservative Anger and Police Misconduct: Exploring Conservative Discussion of Police on Social Media

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study applies thematic analysis to posts made in a popular conservative subreddit on the social media platform Reddit to understand how conservatives discuss police with one another in the context of two ongoing American tragedies—acts of race-based police brutality and mass shootings—in which police seem, at face value, to play very different roles as victimizers and first responders respectively. The study finds that the roles of police are discussed very differently in the online community studied. Within the context of race-based police brutality, popular posts tend to criticize liberals rather than police, and funding police is associated with better crime control. In contrast, posters highlight police inaction during mass shootings—particularly the shooting in Uvalde, Texas—as a form of misconduct and issue calls for accountability. These results suggest that the conservative community studied views defending members of the public as an important obligation of law enforcement, expects that providing the police with resources will enable them to better carry out this obligation, and wants police who fail in doing so held to account.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Thomas Holt and Brenna Helm for their invaluable feedback and support. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In this article, the term “race-based police brutality” refers to high-profile incidents in which a police officer used force against a person of color in the United States in which the proportionality of that use of force was highly controversial among the general public. The use of the term is not intended as a comment on the legal outcomes of any resulting investigations or court cases.

Definitions of what constitutes a mass shooting vary. This study defines a mass shooting as an act of indiscriminate mass murder with a firearm in a public place that results in at least four fatalities (not including the shooter) and is not related to gang violence, domestic violence, or armed robbery. This definition aligns with that used by The Violence Project in compiling the Mass Shooter Database (Smart and Schell 2021).

² Reasonable force is proportionate to the nature of the threat; excessive force is disproportionate to the nature of the threat (Gerber and Jackson 2017).

³ For example, data from social media platforms will underrepresent people without consistent access to internet-connected devices or familiarity/comfort with social media platforms.

⁴ Throughout this article, the word “post” is used as a general term referring to both parent posts and comments.

⁵ The subreddit used is left unnamed to protect the anonymity of its users in keeping with prior work studying online communities (Holt and Bolden 2014; O’Malley, Holt, and Holt 2022).

⁶ The final dataset did not contain any posts that explicitly reflected non-conservative viewpoints.

⁷ The following keywords were used: police, law enforcement, cop, sheriff, feds, federal bureau of investigation, FBI. These keywords were chosen to narrow the data search to only posts discussing the subset of law enforcement officers most relevant to the contexts studied.

⁸ Six comments were included if the fifth and sixth comments had identical scores.

⁹ Note that Reddit members may maintain multiple accounts, so it is not possible to establish whether there is a one-to-one relationship between accounts and individual people in this dataset. While there is no reason to believe the use of multiple accounts by a single individual is prolific within the subreddit studied, the number of unique accounts should be viewed as an upper limit on the number of unique individuals.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Notes on contributors

Sydney Litterer

Sydney Litterer is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on political attitudes, extremist violence, radicalization, and moral reasoning processes.