Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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You should try this next time you get pulled over for speeding.
"But officer, how can you know I was speeding? It is impossible to measure such a thing!"
It's impossible to measure every single instance speeding. Just like it's impossible to measure crimes committed, just convictions or reports.
You don't need to know every single instance of speeding. You just a good representative sample, and then you can plot your trendline from that. That is how statistics like that are measured.
You can't measure actual crimes committed. However, you can make a reasonable guess by factoring in your known unknowns. For example, assume we have a significant sample of reported crimes in a city. Let's pull the number 50/100k people out of our rear end for example purposes.
As you pointed out, we only have the data from the reports. The total number is known unknown. We could then look at a different data set, like a survey, that says something like 20% of people who are victims of the crime never report it, or 20% of people admit to doing it and not getting caught, whatever the case may be.
So, we can cross reference those two statistics to estimate that the "real" rate of that crime is closer to 60/100k people. Even though neither study can predict that number individually.
"Real" crime rates are ridiculously high. Something like 2 per person per day.
Ok, let the numbers be for some specific crime then. I'm just walking folks through the math of where these sorts of claims come from. Not offering a political commentary on under-policing, or over-inclusive definitions of crime, or whatever else.