In this case, police officers from the Weilburg region have found the entry, exit and death books from an insane asylum where hundreds of people have died. They know how many entered and left the asylum and how many died.
For their final report, they create a table containing numbers from these sources. Then they botch reading and evaluating their own data in a way that is almost comical (taking numbers from the wrong column, computing the wrong average). Or could lead one to suspect that they did this on purpose.
Which leads me to the question if a rural police officer from this period would have received any kind of special education for creating and evaluating criminal statistics as part of his training.
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