Last year the FBI reported that its estimated national murder rate increased from about 0.0051% of the population being murdered in 2019 to about 0.0065 in 2020. This was front-page news from nearly every major news organization, with almost all having the banner headline of murder increasing by around 30%, or how this was the single largest year-to-year increase on record. Often they’d talk about rates per 100,000 rather than percent of the population number I’m using, though these are identical except for multiplying by a constant. Using my numbers, homicides barely budged from basically 0% of the population to also basically 0% of the population. Using what nearly everyone else uses - the 30% number and the rate per 100,000 - makes the change seem far more dramatic. So who’s right? We both are. And we’re both wrong.