He also might have attacked or raped someone. That is not a safe situation. It’s not just about property.
More people have died of the flu than obscure cancer X, but you could not logically conclude that catching the flu is more likely to kill you than getting obscure cancer X.
And this doesn't even consider that "person you know" is not the same as "person you know positively". A stalker is a person you know. Your Mafia boss or your drug dealer is a person you know. For that matter, if you let the homeless guy into your office more than once, he's a person you know.
The first half of the objection is that "most rapists are people you know" just does not imply that a person you know is more dangerous than a stranger. It implies that the entire class of "people you know" causes more rapes than the entire class of strangers you have substantial contact with, but it doesn't imply that a single person from the first class is more dangerous than a single person from the second class, because the classes are of different sizes.
I'm pretty sure that more people are killed by slipping in the bathtub than by falling into a volcano. You should not conclude that falling into a volcano is safer than slipping in a bathtub, because people encounter bathtubs a lot more and you have not corrected your figures for frequency of encounters.
The point of noting that 90% figure is not so you can come up with some sort of Bayesian probability of your getting assaulted based on population level statistics. It's to shift the narrative of the nature of sexual assault and rape to something more reflective of the reality of these crimes in practice.
You even see it here in this thread, the idea that homeless people are lurking in the street ready to rape and assault you if you make the mistake of offering them kindness. But that's not how 90%+ of these crimes actually happen in practice, so why should our first response to the homeless be one of profound distrust?
> I'm pretty sure that more people are killed by slipping in the bathtub than by falling into a volcano. You should not conclude that falling into a volcano is safer than slipping in a bathtub, because people encounter bathtubs a lot more and you have not corrected your figures for frequency of encounters.
Again, it's not just about the frequency of encounters, it's about the nature of them. On any given day I encounter more strangers than I do friends and family. But my interactions with strangers are not conducive to the crimes of rape and sexual assault. Friends, family, and acquaintances work to gain your trust before they violate it. If we really want to get into it, then the thing to watch out for is not stranger versus familiar status of a person, but whether they direct certain manipulative behaviors toward you.
It's quite common that people have a point when they are presenting statistics, but they have made this point in error. Statistics aren't something you're only supposed to use for the one conclusion someone wants you to draw from them.
>Again, it's not just about the frequency of encounters, it's about the nature of them. On any given day I encounter more strangers than I do friends and family.
You have fewer man-hours of encounters with strangers than you do with people you know, even if the absolute number of the strangers is higher. (And you shouldn't be invoking "friends and family", since that isn't the same as "people you know".)
You do not allow a situation like this to occur. If it does, there is a serious problem with your security. Period.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
> You have fewer man-hours of encounters with strangers than you do with people you know
You can only speak for yourself, this is not true for everybody.