Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

google 'felon warrant fires police'

I'm honestly shocked I'm forced to even cite that this happens. Although I suppose if someone has lived in America and made it to adulthood without acknowledging the stories they aren't going to be convinced.




I don’t think that search result would support your statement.


Shootings in my local news basically fall into two categories, drug related disputes on the bad side of town, or people shooting at police when they show up.

This returns a decent number of relevant and recent results:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+shot+serving+warrant&iar=news&ia=...


That only tells us about when it does happen. We also need to know how many times it doesn't happen. If we see 250 suspects per year shooting at cops when served a warrant, but 50,000 surrendering relatively peacefully, then I don't know that we have a big problem.

Sure, 250 per year might support the statement "Almost every day in the US you see someone who decides to go out with guns blazing rather than go back", but that doesn't mean it's common.

Put another way, 250 people doing this per year could be considered "almost every day", but I'm not sure 250 people in a country of more than 350M doing something exceedingly, dangerously irrational is cause for concern, or even more than a shrug.

Also: your search result page doesn't say what you think it does. I clicked through a few of them, and many of them just talk about warrants in general (even search warrants, not arrest warrants) where no shooting occurred at all. On one of them I noticed that the word "shot" appeared in the "related stories" links at the bottom, in a case that had nothing to do with an arrest warrant or police.


Yeah, they don't.


He said google. Not bing ;-P

Plenty of shootings involving felons on parole in the news.


News articles are biased towards likelihood of clicks.


That doesn’t make them any less true? I think you’re confusing selection bias with the fact that something happened.

Say a news outlet says “X happened and it’s bad”. Another news outlet says “X happened and it’s good.” Both have their respective slant. Fine. But BOTH say X happened. Stuff that’s not newsworthy doesn’t go into news. You can’t just dismiss facts with prejudice as in “Don’t look up”.


The thing is that "warrant served without gunfire" doesn't get clicks, so it doesn't get reported. Looking at news sites tells you nothing at all about the relative prevalence of those two cases.


The relative prevalence is irrelevant. The claim was about shootings by felons on parole preferring to be killed by police rather than going back to jail. That claim was used to support the hypothesis that jails are horrible. The claim was not A is more common than B.


It sure sounded like a claim about prevalence. I know that some people win the lottery, but I wouldn't say that "plenty" of people win the lottery.


Reporting outlier anecdotes is more profitable than reporting systematic data analysis.

Outliers are true in the sense of factual, but false in the sense of accurate. The "Don't Look Up" metaphor applied here would be that the media is telling you to look, when reality is that you shouldn't.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: