This is a requested re-posting of a post originally written July 22, 2020. ]
I wrote yesterday about the leftward spin of mainstream news. My example was an article in the Atlantic that attempted to explain the author’s belief that the police should be abolished by citing what turned out to be a fictitious incident from her past.
Today I read of an article in The New Yorker, another anti-police piece, that makes a startling claim. In the article, author Jill Lepore, who is a professor of American history at Harvard, makes this claim:
“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.” – Jill Lapore, July 13, 2020
Two-thirds? That’s an alarming statistic, if true.
The study she mentions was conducted by Harvard doctoral student Justin Feldman in 2016. A Harvard write-up about the study contained this sentence:
“Sixty-four percent of the estimated 683,033 injuries logged between 2001-2014 among persons age 15-34 resulted from an officer hitting a civilian.” – Harvard News, 2016
What the news story didn’t make clear is that the 683,033 injuries referred specifically to injuries caused by law enforcement and/or private security. That isn’t the total of all emergency room visits by this demographic, merely the total of all emergency room visits by young people that resulted from encounters with police or private security personnel over a 14 year period.
What the study found was that about two-thirds of all police and/or security related emergency room visits made by young people were the result of the patient being struck, as opposed to, for example, tasered, pepper-sprayed, shot, etc.
The actual percentage of ALL emergency room visits by people in the 15-34 age range that result from an officer or private security person striking the victim? It’s estimated to be about 0.2%.
In other words, the New Yorker article got it wrong by more than a factor of 100.
And, coincidentally, the mistake once again favors the left’s narrative.
When the overwhelming majority of journalists, professors, etc., live in progressive bubbles, it’s hardly surprising that even their innocent mistakes all tilt one way. All the more reason to encourage a healthy debate.
And the standard closing: mainstream media makes you less well informed. Read broadly, and with skepticism. And just turn off the television.