General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: There are roughly 800,000 cops in the United States... [View all]HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)I do completely agree with you that creating a snowstorm of anecdotes without reference to some sense of scale can also be misinforming and misleading.
Yet, I can grasp that reports of uncommon occurrences of events even without a broader context CAN be informative. Consider the circumstance where there is zero or near zero tolerance for the occurrence of such events. In such circumstance even rare events can occur at an intolerable level (on DU an excellent example of a widely held zero/extremely near zero tolerance is for school shootings).
Threshold of tolerance for frequency of occurrence of an event can make all the difference in statistical interpretation, yet tolerance itself isn't determined statistically. It's a choice and its assignment can be contentious.
I suspect tolerance for police misconduct is low across much of American society and, among people who are sensitized to it, that threshold very closely approximates zero. For a person of such mind, ignoring whether the percentage is reasonably cast, a small value for a bad event doesn't interpret as overarching good, it means the occurrence is nonzero, and, therefore intolerable.