Spiegel’s weakness in maths…or: their deliberate lack of information?
Sorry guys, today I can not keep my promise and write on the differences in our local TV channels plus the way they provide the news. I was just skimming Spiegel Online two days ago and found some other confusing facts and numbers we are provided with by the media, which I wanted to share with you:
At the beginning of 2017 much attention was drawn to the police in Cologne. Many people feared to celebrate their NYE next to the cathedral where one year before so many women had encountered sexual attacks and robberies. Most of the suspecteds of 2016 had been people from North Africa. The police tried to avoid another desaster in 2017 and thus checked on those who wanted to celebrate next to the cathedral. Around 1700 police officers did their best to protect the people and to guarantee a safe NYE celebration in Cologne and only a few number of offences had been counted.
Already shortly after their operation the police was heavily criticized by several politicians and some media. They had been accused for only checking colored people’s nationalities and therefore practiced the so called forbidden „racial profiling“. However, the police repudiated these reproaches.
Nonetheless, there are some facts that just caught my attention when reading Spiegel`s article on the corrected number of collected nationalities during NYE:
1) The police stated that they checked up to 2500 identities at that night. Some of them they double checked. Alright, so far so good.
2) Shortly after NYE the police declared that most of the people they checked had been people from North Africa or rather „arabic-looking young males“. Okay so,…now what?
3) When skimming Spiegel’s article now, we get to know that the police did a mistake some weeks ago: the majority of checked males had been from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan…countries that do NOT belong to North Africa, as they stated in the news before. Alright, so the police was wrong and published wrong information. Why that? Just to publish some data to calm down the people and give them some numbers they would like to hear? Common!
4) But still another thing got my attention: Spiegel just wrote that about 674 identities had been checked by the police from which of 425 they could identify their nationality. They subdivided this group of 425 nationalities into the following: 99 Iraqi, 94 Syrians, 48 Afghan, 46 Germans, 17 Marrocan and 13 Algerian. I am not an maths-expert but these nationalities amount to 317. What about the rest? Why do we get to know the numbers if they do not make any sense at all? What about the rest of the information? Is there a gap/loss of information again or only half the truth available?
I was quite disappointed when I finished reading Spiegel’s article. Why do people publish numbers and then reverse it? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the REAL total numbers are available? Why are the readers provided with numbers that do not add up to the result which Spiegel provides us with? Don’t they think we double-check what we are reading? You better should double-check, people,….you better should!
Article: http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/silvester-in-koeln-polizei-korrigiert-eigene-angaben-ueber-kontrollierte-a-1129870.html
