Readers of the New Yorker (which describes itself in Trumpian terms as the best magazine that ever was) were recently told the following:
One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.
Louise Perry reviewed the scientific study on which is was based:
I did my best to work out a rough estimate of the true proportion of 15-34 year olds visiting the ER who had suffered legal intervention injuries, and arrived at a figure of 0.2% (you can follow my working in this thread). So I believe Lepore’s claim to be off by a factor of several hundred.
Because New Yorker readers are a superior breed, with Bayesian reasoning skills, they will dutifully reduce their estimate of the frequency of police beatings by a factor of 300, once they are informed of Ms. Perry’s correction.
Those that don’t see the correction will assume that 1/3 of all ER admissions of young people (at a minimum) are for people who were beaten by police after they were injured in a traffic accident, in what can only be described as adding insult to injury. That’s because New Yorker readers are good at math, and understand that 2/3 plus 2/3 equals 4/3.
PS. I learned early on not to trust the press. The photo below describes a dispute between my dad and a neighbor over a garage. I recall (back in the 1960s) my dad telling me that the newspaper got the facts wrong. And that’s despite the fact that my dad’s brother was a reporter for this paper (The Capital Times). I was reminded of this story by a Matt Yglesias tweet that I saw today, describing a very similar dispute in Maine.
