0
$\begingroup$

On the (dutch) news there was stated that judge James Robart made the following statement:

41% of the police violence involves black people, while only 20% of the population is black

Now the question is, if the black population was not 20% but 50%, what would the the percentage of police violence involving black people be?

  • 1
    It is not determined from that data (even if you make some simplifying assumptions). You also need to know something like the percentage of the black population that experiences police violence. – 2017-02-06
  • 1
    Suppose police meeting black person incites violence with probability $p_{B}$ and meeting white person incites violence with probability $p_{W}$. Then the fraction of violence that involves black people is $\frac{\frac{1}{5}p_{B}}{\frac{1}{5}p_{B}+\frac{4}{5}p_{w}}=0.41$. Multiple $(p_{B},p_{W})$ satisfy this equation and will map into different fraction of violence if the fraction of black people is $50\%$ – 2017-02-06

0 Answers 0