Public sentiment towards the police is a matter of great interest in the United States, as reports on police misconduct are increasingly being published in mass and social media. This study tests how the public's perception of the police can be shaped by media reports of police brutality and local crime. Data on media coverage of police brutality and local crime, along with Twitter posts (2010–2020) about the police in 18 metropolitan areas, were collected and analyzed using transfer entropy analysis. The study discovered an association between public sentiment and media coverage of police brutality, cautiously interpreted as causal. Public sentiment appears driven by media portrayals of police misconduct, with no statistically significant evidence of a comparable effect from crime reports.
