For years, decades, we’ve had only individual stories of cops shooting people. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Just go look.
Then one reporter decided to tabulate statistics. Get numbers. Collate data. Then what did RadioLab do? Did they analyze the data, get more data, make plots, do correlations, etc.? Any of the usual data analysis techniques that hadn’t been done before?
Nope. They ignored any big picture stuff, and decided to do two podcasts on individual stories. They even said straight out that here are the statistics and we’re going to ignore them and do Yet Another Human Interest Story (or two).
So much for Science.
Not that every individual that’s on the wrong end of an “officer-involved shooting” doesn’t deserve to have their story told! But we had that before. It’s called “the daily newspaper.”
We didn’t have statistics before.
But these guys, being 1) NPR and 2) data-ignorant, decided to not report on the data, because that’s hard, and requires thinking, and skill, and just go back to what’s easy.
Dammit. Missing the point.