Logical Reasoning

PT143 · S1 · Q11 Police chief: During my tenure

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Police chief: During my tenure as chief, crime in this city has fallen by 20 percent.

Curious Fact

Why has crime in this city fallen by 20% during my tenure as chief?

Chief's Explanation

It's because of my policing strategy of using real-time crime data and focusing police resources on the areas with the most crime.

Evaluate

Whenever we want to Weaken an Explain the Curious Fact type setup, we either want 1. an Alternate Explanation for the curious fact or 2. to hurt the plausibility of the Author's Explanation

Goal

Let's look for something that provides a different reason why crime has fallen by 20% (e.g. population has decreased / economic opportunities have improved / mandatory minimum sentencing has deterrent effect, etc.)

Or let's look for something that makes it seem implausible that the chief's strategy of using real-time data to focus on where to send police resources wouldn't be doing it (e.g. we were already doing that sort of stuff before the chief arrived / real-time crime data can't be interpreted quickly enough to mobilize police resources in time to stop any more crimes from occurring).

11.

Which one of the following, if true, most calls into question the police chief's explanation for the drop in crime?

  1. The crime rate in the

    No Impact

    Comparing this city to other cities in terms of absolute levels of crime is irrelevant. We only care about a relative shift in crime rate. We're only trying to figure out why crime in the chief's city has improved, relative to where that same city was before the chief's arrival.

    2% picked this

  2. The crime rate in the

    No Impact

    Just like (A), this is invoking a comparison that doesn't have anything to do with our Curious Fact. We know when the chief took office, the crime rate was higher than it is now. We're just trying to explain why the crime rate has come down during the chief's tenure. The fact that several decades before the chief arrived the crime was even lower has no impact on this conversation. In case this helps, pretend that we're ranking Detroit in terms of per capita crimes. 1980: 20th 2010: 5th (chief arrives) 2020: 12th It doesn't matter than in 1980 Detroit was way lower on the crime list. All this argument cares about it why Detroit went from 5th worst to 12th worst during the chief's tenure.

    9% picked this

  3. The crime rate in the

    Weak Impact

    This might help us argue that the chief's strategies don't seem to be working any longer, since we're no longer seeing a decline in the crime rate. But that's not really an objection. If the chief's strategies caused that initial significant fall in the crime rate (the 20% drop), then the chief still wins the argument. This answer doesn't suggest an alternate explanation for why the crime rate fell by 20%. And it only impugns the plausibility that the chief's methods weren't the cause if we think, "if a crime rate levels off after an initial steep decline, then it probably wasn't caused by using real-time data to allocate resources to areas with most crime". But there's no common sense connection there.

    3% picked this

  4. Correct

    The crime rate in the

    Why this is right

    This hurts the plausibility that the chief's strategy is helping and suggests that there is probably some broader explanation for why crime has fallen. If the crime rate in the whole country has gone down by 30% during the chief's tenure, then there is probably something going on nationwide that is causing crime rates to drop (new laws / better economic opportunities). Moreover, the fact that the rest of the country's crime rate is falling at an average of 30% while the chief's city has only seen a 20% decrease makes it look like the chief is doing a bad job. Say that there's an LSAT class of 30 students, and one of them is getting tutored by me, in addition to taking the class. I could boast, "look, this student's score improved by 5 points. This is clearly the result of my tutoring." If you were to say, "well everyone else in that class has had their score go up by an average of 10 points", that would reflect poorly on my tutoring, right? That's the same idea as what we're looking at here.

    Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    81% picked this

  5. The variation in crime rates

    No Impact

    Comparing this city to other cities in an absolute way is irrelevant. We would like to compare this city pre-chief to this city during the chief's tenure. We can otherwise compare relative shifts (20% less crime) in this city vs. relative shifts in other cities. But comparing a number for this city to a number in other cities does nothing. Do we care about "variation in crime rates between different areas of the city"? Possibly? The chief's strategy does involve allocating police resources in dynamic ways to different places in the city. Could that affect the variation in crime rates between different areas of the city? Yes, although I don't think it's clear enough what effect it would have for LSAT to think this is a common sense indicator of whether the chief's strategy seems to be making a difference. If it used to be that police were fairly well distributed throughout the city, but some rich neighborhoods had very low crime and some poorer neighborhoods had very high crime, then there would be a high variation in crime rates between different areas. If the chief starts allocating more police to the more troublesome areas, that would potentially bring those outliers closer to the average crime rate for the city. So if anything, shrinking the variation between different areas of the city might be a sign that the chief's strategy is doing something, which would strengthen.

    5% picked this

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