High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders

[SteelCitySouth]

(09-18-2015, 10:21 AM)Blutarsky Wrote: No doubt the statistics..an example of how they are used to inappropriately support an agenda.

I literally highlighted it in AU's post.  He wanted to use the overall deaths per year as a result of drinking and driving with overall deaths due to pursuit.  This is quite incorrect as there are other populations within the second group that are not driving impaired when being pursued.  That however is not the biggest issue.  When comparing the first group with the second group we actually need to know more about the first to get a real understanding of the risk when pursuing the impaired person in the second group.

The information we need is impossible to get though.  We need to know how many impaired drivers make it home without incident so we can get a per-capita of impaired drivers that cause accidents that include the death of someone.  Then we need to find out how many pursuits of impaired individuals happen, and how many of those end in the death of someone to get a per-capita within that population.  Then we can finally compare the two populations.

All too often people want to compare two populations using the raw numbers and then assign risk.  This is lazy and results in the misappropriation of resources in the end.