e.g. Imagine a world where police do their job even better, and eliminate all murder. But, in some cases, they have to kill the murderer before he takes an innocent victim. They never kill unless it's absolutely necessary and justified. In such a world, this statistic rises to "All people killed by strangers are killed by police", which sounds worse than the headline, yet such a world is obviously better than ours.
e.g. Imagine a world where police never do anything. They drink beer in the station all day. All people killed by strangers are killed by non-police. Such a world is much worse than ours, yet this stat looks a lot better.
Just these very simple thought experiments should give you pause about what this statistical comparison actually means (or if it means anything at all).
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My two questions to those who think this is some sort of obvious travesty:
1. What would be a healthy ratio between [people killed by non-police strangers] and [people killed by police]? 1:5? 1:10? 1:100? Why?
2. How is this random choice of two statistics not just another variation on the Chinese robber fallacy? [1]
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chine...