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Your second data point is not a relevant comparison. The number you need is the number of people incorrectly taken from their parents by CPS.


Of course it's relevant. I am certain that I am far from alone in expecting CPS to incorrectly take children more than 115/3.2 million = 0.0036% of the time, which means that even without knowing the exact percentage of the time that CPS is mistaken, I was convinced by those numbers that a random kid has a higher chance of being mistakenly taken by CPS than abducted by a stranger.

Are you telling me that even though you, like me, don't know the exact percentage of the time that CPS is mistaken, you expect it to be less that 0.0036%?


Yes, I do think it's less than 0.0036%.

First we see from the data that CPS declared 2.5 million of those 3.2 as "non-victims" so we can eliminate type 1 errors from almost 80% of the population right there.

Of the remaining 700k it's not inconceivable at all that in a big percentage of cases there were actually significant parental problems. Frankly I bet that type 2 errors are much more common that type 1 for this population.


http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/in-a-yea...

> 2.5 million of those kids were declared 'non-victims.' Another 686,000 were 'abused' or 'neglected.' And an estimated 1,640 kids died as a result.

Their error rate on non-victims is a helluva alot higher than that.

I don't have faith their error rate for victims is much better given we don't have data for that.




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