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In this article, we have the data that police officers have around 50 million interactions with the public and 1000 Fatal shootings but later they say "... those interactions led to fatal shootings about 0.00002 percent of the time."

How exactly does it work? Shouldn't it be: (1000/50Mil)*100 = 0.002% instead?

user107785
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  • Your math is clearly accurate, and the discrepancy may be explained by the writer being intentionally or unintentionally in error. mathSE probably not the site for debating non-math issues. – user2661923 Jan 01 '21 at 11:05
  • @user2661923 Thank you. I personally was just concerned with the mathematics of it and not the actual political debate. But it's good to know my math was accurate. Cheers! – user107785 Jan 01 '21 at 11:11

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$1000$ over $50000000$ is $0.00002$, but just like my students do, they forget, hopefully just because of math ignorance, that percentage is over $100$

It's like saying that $150$ over $300$ students are girls, thus the percentage of girls is $0.5\%$

The correct percentage of fatal shootings is $0.002\%$, like you said correctly in your post.

Remark. I find tons of math mistakes on the papers. The most recent? On a national famous journal in an article about smoking they said that "[...] yearly 17 millions euro go up in smoke." A mistake is a MISTAKE if you miss 3 orders of magnitude...

Raffaele
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