Quote:
Originally Posted by PsYcNeT
Stats always tell the whole story; the story people are trying to formulate is one based off of fear rather than data.
People love to assign narratives to numbers, but that doesn't make the narrative fact.
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No, stats don't always tell the whole story.
For instance, if all 700 of those increased assaults were stabbings and 100% of the assailants were unknown to the victim (i.e. random), that is a different
story than if 100% of the assaults were instead something entirely different, say domestic cases where 100% of the victims and assailants knew each other.
Or, if next year, all 12,000 (or whatever) cases of assault were between sibblings and involved nerf guns, we'd have a completely different situation and problem to solve than if all 12,000 cases were completely random acts of rock throwing.
Instead we have what seems to be an increase in random assaults perpetrated at random between strangers. But if you don't want to look beyond the headline number, see a decrease and think everything's a-OK, I don't know what to tell you.
As usual, numbers only tell part of the
story and context is everything.