Nine months after Ferguson became a nasty household name, law enforcement and their supporters are pushing back via media.

At stake is one of the biggest bets in modern times, cops’ reputation for historic fairness.

At issue is whether plain people will believe raw numbers are a persuasive reflection of the precious, precarious tradition of morality in American police departments.

Nobody knows yet.

Can mere statistics level the debate about police fairness vs. brutality after an unrelenting nine-month avalanche of so-called police brutality reports?

According to a recent public service announcement — by a pro-police group – that produced a wall of publicity-countering data making the rounds on YouTube:

“In regards to charges of true excessive force by police,” says a somber narrator, “you are seven times more likely to be murdered, 15 times more likely to be killed in a burning wreck that used to be your car and 42 times more likely to be raped” than you are to be brutalized by a law enforcement officer.

Here is how such conclusions were reached.

Introductorily, the narrator says: “Based on recent media attention, one might wonder, ‘what is with all of the police violence? Are the police out of control? Are there any honest cops left?’”

And then the counter-punching blizzard of dizzying data is served up:

“As of 2012, there were 313,910,000 people living within the U.S.

“In that same year, the FBI said there were just over 670,000 sworn peace officers. This equates to be less than 2½  peace officers for every 1,000 people.

“While peace officers represent less than a quarter percent of the population, and in the performance of their duties will come into contract with 17 percent of the population, they subsequently arrest less than 4 percent of the population.

“That is assuming that no single person was arrested more than once in that.

“Now an excessive force complaint can come from anyone. But the focus should be on officer contact.

“In a year’s time, 670,000 cops have contact with over 53 million citizens. These contacts could be anything from being pulled over, issued a citation, given a warning, interviewed as a witness, requesting a service, involved in an accident, reporting a crime, witness a police action, victim of a crime or even being arrested.

“Of all of those millions of contacts, the Bureau of Justice statistics show 26,000 complaints were made due to excessive force. This is not quite half of .0049 percent of all police contacts. Only 8 percent of complaints were sustained as having any form of merit or evidence. That is 2,080 complaints, or 0.0039 percent of all law enforcement contacts.

“To put things in perspective, in the same time frame, 84,373 people in the U.S. reported being forcibly raped, 30,800 were killed in traffic collisions, and 14,827 were murdered.”

Are you dissuaded of your old belief? Are you convinced? More skeptical than ever?