I haven't taken any Criminonology classes so I cannot comment on the level of field rigor in even a subset but this resembles a stereotypical case of "non-Mathe

I haven't taken any Criminonology classes so I cannot comment on the level of field rigor in even a subset but this resembles a stereotypical case of "non-Mathematics Liberal arts majors who think they were done with math". There is a sadly significant culturally innumerate population who will look at you with scorn and anger for even daring to bring up numbers even for something straightforward like "does a year of typical catfood or small dog breed dogfood cost more" instead of trying to guess based on concepts like "beef is more expensive than fish" or "crazy cat ladies are willing to pay more". Their reaction seems more ignorance than "caught in a lie bullshit more". It also sounds like TV news screenshots mocked online for poll percentages which overflow 100%. I have done research and replicated sources in high school. They often took numbers from multiple related sources and questions and miscombined them. "Like they had the unpaid interns who knew how to use a computer source the data" was a trope of an explanation but it may well have been the senior professionals who did so.