A few days ago, I saw this headline—"Police officers killed surge 28% this year"—on the social media feed of someone I know to be in the MAGA cult. They love this kind of stuff. To me, it seems like a hard sell for their beloved incumbent. "Things are spiraling out of control on my watch, re-elect me!" As Julia Louis-Dreyfus pointed out at the DNC this evening, everyone thought that when Trump, in his inaugural address, kept talking about "American carnage," he was putting forward a criticism of the recent past, not making a promise about the future.
Anyway, I clicked on the link and read the article, which is from ABC News. Here is the third paragraph:
Shoop became the 32nd U.S. law enforcement officer shot to death this year on July 13, marking a 28% jump in felonious officer deaths over the same period in 2019, according to data from the FBI.
Quick math question: 32 is 28% more than what number? I think the answer is 25. So I'm thinking that last year at this time, 25 officers had been killed, and this year it's up to 32. Is it fair to call this a "surge" and an excuse to commence performing sociology? To me, it seems more plausibly another data point in a random walk. In the article, the phrase "data from the FBI" is a hyperlink. When you click on it, you're taken here, and it turns out that the actual figure from last year was not 25 but 27. Here again is the headline: "Police officers killed surge 28% this year." Not great, because (a) 27 to 32 is hardly a "surge" and (b) even if you must hyperventilate about a "surge," there's no way it's a 28% surge.
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