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I really dislike the trend where reporters invent narratives in a headline and then throw out some BS statistics in the story that readers will inevitably skim

I really dislike the trend where reporters invent narratives in a headline and then throw out some BS statistics in the story that readers will inevitably skim and then walk away thinking they were "informed" by.. Take the following statement: > If organized retail thieves steal $70 billion annually, and California accounts for 10% of the U.S., California’s losses add up to $7 billion, meaning the Bay Area “is likely in the billions itself.” CA being 10% of the population does not mean you can take a national $ of retail theft and divide it by 10. Yet, the author tries to conflate this multiple times in the article and then comes up with a non-sensical conclusion in the last paragraph. There are so many leaps of logic that it made my head hurt.

mcguire 5y ago
Did you miss the part where it was a California Retail Association staffer who made that comment: "Asked how the organization arrived at that figure, a CRA staffer said that “there’s no way of knowing exactly” how much organized retail crime affects the bottom line of businesses. The staffer said the estimate was based on a back-of-the-napkin calculation: If organized retail thieves steal $70 billion annually, and California accounts for 10% of the U.S., California’s losses add up to $7 billion, meaning the Bay Area “is likely in the billions itself.”" It was immediately followed by, "Leaving aside some of those assumptions, how did they come up with that $70-billion number? The staffer pointed to a report from the Retail Industry Leaders Assn. published this year. But that report didn’t find that organized retail thieves stole $68.9 billion per year at all — it estimated that all retail crime combined, including employee theft, regular shoplifting and fraud, added up to that number." In other words, a rebuttal of the quote. The final paragraph is, "On the other hand, stolen merchandise can sometimes be recovered. The CHP reported that it contributed to recovering $20 million in merchandise stolen by organized theft rings in 2020. If the national average of 0.07% losses holds for California — Mathews at the NRF said the group could not break out data by state — that’s more than 10% of losses to organized retail theft in the state, well above the national recovery rate for stolen items (excluding cars), which hovers below 4%, according to the FBI." I had no problems making sense of that.

mcguire 5y ago

Did you miss the part where it was a California Retail Association staffer who made that comment: "Asked how the organization arrived at that figure, a CRA staffer said that “there’s no way of knowing exactly” how much organized retail crime affects the bottom line of businesses. The staffer said the estimate was based on a back-of-the-napkin calculation: If organized retail thieves steal $70 billion annually, and California accounts for 10% of the U.S., California’s losses add up to $7 billion, meaning the Bay Area “is likely in the billions itself.”" It was immediately followed by, "Leaving aside some of those assumptions, how did they come up with that $70-billion number? The staffer pointed to a report from the Retail Industry Leaders Assn. published this year. But that report didn’t find that organized retail thieves stole $68.9 billion per year at all — it estimated that all retail crime combined, including employee theft, regular shoplifting and fraud, added up to that number." In other words, a rebuttal of the quote. The final paragraph is, "On the other hand, stolen merchandise can sometimes be recovered. The CHP reported that it contributed to recovering $20 million in merchandise stolen by organized theft rings in 2020. If the national average of 0.07% losses holds for California — Mathews at the NRF said the group could not break out data by state — that’s more than 10% of losses to organized retail theft in the state, well above the national recovery rate for stolen items (excluding cars), which hovers below 4%, according to the FBI." I had no problems making sense of that.