And you&#x27;re doubling down by comparing whole apples to orange sections.<p>If I&#x27;m going to use statistics to rationally calibrate my fear emotion, I should ensure that I am using the <i>appropriate</i> statistic.<p>I&#x27;d start off with the assumption that most violent crimes against me will be committed by another person that is both aware of my presence and able to make a credible threat of force against me.  I&#x27;m probably not going to get punched in the face by anyone who cannot reach my face with their fists.<p>And I can further break that down by the fraction of time any given person presents me with the threat of violence.  I may, perhaps, use risk of violence per minute of exposure as my metric.<p>It immediately becomes obvious that the publicly-available published crime statistics are useless for my purposes.  They do not contain sufficient information to allow me to determine how much more or less likely I am to be attacked by a person of a given skin color for each minute of exposure to that person in public.  I would have to know detailed social habits for everyone within the crime statistic reporting area.<p>It may be that for every 100000 <i>opportunities</i> to punch someone in the face, the conversion rate is higher for one skin color than for another, and I should therefore rationally calibrate my fear accordingly.  But I really have no way of accurately determining that useful statistic from published crime data.<p>But even with that hanging over us, I still have to object to your misuse of statistics.  You said:<p><pre><code>  &gt; You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by
  &gt; a white person than a black person, if you are a white person.
</code></pre>
And this does not follow from the previous paragraph.  Given a randomly selected white person who was attacked in the last year, it is 4 times more likely that the attacker was white than black.  Manipulating that conditional probability to find the ratio of probabilities that a randomly selected white person was attacked by a white person compared with a randomly selected white person being attacked by a black person requires additional Bayesian calculations that you did not perform.  You would also need to know population sizes and overall violent crime rates.<p>But really, this is all moot, because <i>fear is not rational</i>.