Someone committed suicide by hanging themself with an ethernet cable, it wasn't an "artifact"
If the suicide rate is 17 per 22000, then natural variance alone will push about 14% of random 22k samples into "more than double the base rate" area.
In other words, if you take this indicator alone, then you'll have a false positive about 14% of the time. Obviously, the key word is "alone". With more data about bullying as the cause of suicide you might get better estimations.
Is this true? Can you show the math on this? I'm not seeing it.
Actually (from approximating the binomial distribution with n=22k and p=17/22000 with normal one) getting the rate over 30 per 22k has p<0.001.
GP doesn't seem to have read the article and is throwing some statistics gimmicks.