I've crunched the numbers on several national crime datasets, and year-to-year fluctuations are often larger than real five-year changes. Yet headlines scream whenever a single year ticks up by 4%, and politicians jump on that to push stricter sentencing. In my own work with local police stats, I've seen how much demographic shifts and reporting changes skew the raw counts. If people can't interpret basic margins of error, are official statistics doing more harm than good by being published uncorrected?