1 in 9 is so absurdly high it calls into question everything about the study. There are about 42 million teenagers in the US right now. 1:9 would be about 4.67 million teens. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), SWAT teams in the US were deployed about 45,000 times in 2014. Not all of these would be "SWAT'ing" incidents (a prank call resulting in a SWAT team response), but it gives some context to the scale of SWAT operations.
Even if it was 1:10,000 you'd see like 4200 teens swatted. Back of the napkin math would mean roughly 1:10 SWAT calls are pranks. I kinda doubt that too.
1 in 9 lunacy. If 1 in 9 teens got swatted it would be a huge deal. (for a good time let chatgpt + wolfram do all the calculations and start comparing to the 240 million 911 calls made each year... you'd be looking at 1 in 100 911 calls being swat pranks....
I mean, I don't exactly pretend to believe I see a truly statistically good cross section of US teens but through family connections and friends I probably know a few dozen, and I don't know of a single one who has ever been swatted. I can't even imagine any of their friends would have been swatted, but I can't say I've interviewed them all about it.
1 in 9 is pretty insane, if that's actually reality there's gotta be some extreme compounding factors influencing it.
These types of things can be guesstimated on validity pretty well, using likelihood. Do you know 10 people? 20? Ask how many have been swatted. If the answer is "none", then it decreases the likelihood that the model is accurate. The further off your sampling is from the "reported" rates, the more likely that that model is wrong.
The other explanation is that the data is heterogeneous but then that means we have an aggregation error. That also isn't great either, especially since it means the problem is potentially even larger, but only affecting a specific group.
Sometimes the numbers are staggering because society is deeply in denial.
Thays how ot was with sexual abuse of children in churches.