Q11 - Police chief: During my tenure

[ohthatpatrick]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Weaken

Break down the Stimulus:
Conclusion: My policing strategy (of realtime data) has caused a 20% reduction in crime.
Evidence: During my tenure as chief, crime in the city has fallen 20%.

Any prephrase?
There's probably no bigger pattern in Weaken questions then an author's conclusion offering an Explanation or Interpretation for some stat/phenom/curiosity presented in the evidence. We always have the same 2 pressure points to consider: "How ELSE could we explain/interpret the same evidence?" and "How PLAUSIBLE is the author's explanation?" The first type is much more common, so I would primarily prephrase "How else can we explain why crime fell by 20%?" and secondarily consider answers that sounded like "using real-time crime data to focus police resources is unlikely to have succeeded in reducing crime".

Correct answer:
D

Answer choice analysis:
A) Comparing to other cities is irrelevant. OUR city's crime rate DID go down, and we're hunting for why.

B) Comparing to the past is irrelevant. During this chief's tenure, there WAS a 20% improvement, and we're hunting for why.

C) The fact that the improvement leveled off doesn't change the fact that there WAS a 20% improvement, and we still don't know why.

D) Oh, this looks good. We still don't know why crime is falling nationally, but given that nationwide crime is down 30%, that reframes the evidence. Now it looks like a 20% reduction in crime is actually BAD. Jeez, chief, the rest of the country is down 30%. What have you done to screw things up and make it so that your city is only down 20%?

E) It's a citywide stat we're trying to explain. Who cares who the stat breaks down into smaller regions? And who cares about how that region by region breakdown compares with that of other cities? We just wanna know why crime is down 20% in this city.

Takeaway/Pattern: There might be no more important thing to learn for Assumption Family questions then this: "When the author concludes an Explanation/Interpretation, the strongest possibility is that the correct answer deals with an alternative way to explain or interpret the same evidence."

#officialexplanation

[sanchez.zoilac]

I eliminated the correct answer D because it seemed to be irrelevant to the reduction in crime. Is crime as a whole reduced, how do we know that the city's own efforts didn't contribute the the decrease? I think the right answer would have been stronger if it mentioned how the country as a whole adopted a policy to reduce crime.

Please advise! Thanks!

[sanchez.zoilac]

Very helpful, thank you!!!!

[andrewgong01]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Weaken


D) Oh, this looks good. We still don't know why crime is falling nationally, but given that nationwide crime is down 30%, that reframes the evidence. Now it looks like a 20% reduction in crime is actually BAD. Jeez, chief, the rest of the country is down 30%. What have you done to screw things up and make it so that your city is only down 20%?

E) It's a citywide stat we're trying to explain. Who cares who the stat breaks down into smaller regions? And who cares about how that region by region breakdown compares with that of other cities? We just wanna know why crime is down 20% in this city.

Takeaway/Pattern: There might be no more important thing to learn for Assumption Family questions then this: "When the author concludes an Explanation/Interpretation, the strongest possibility is that the correct answer deals with an alternative way to explain or interpret the same evidence."

#officialexplanation

For answer choice "D", that sounds like it is committing a Part vs Whole flaw and that's why I eliminated it. Because sure the country as a whole fell by 30% but that does not mean every district has to fall by that much because some districts may be far more dangerous than others so we can not put "D" into good perspective if we can blame the police chief for the fall in 20% as oppose to 30%.

For "E", I interpreted it somewhat differently. The stimulus said the strategy that "worked" was targeting places with higher crime rate than others. However, "E" weakens the plausibility of targeting certain areas with higher crime rate works because "E" is saying the variation in crime rate in the city is lower than normal. In other words, perhaps the city's crime distribution is roughly the same across all areas and hence targeting areas with higher crime rates is probably not the reason why there is a fall since almost everywhere in the city has the same crime rate; hence, it must have been a different reason why crime fell by 20%.

[snoopy]

I eliminated the correct answer D because it seemed to be irrelevant to the reduction in crime. Is crime as a whole reduced, how do we know that the city's own efforts didn't contribute the the decrease? I think the right answer would have been stronger if it mentioned how the country as a whole adopted a policy to reduce crime.

Please advise! Thanks!

Is a policy really necessary to mention in order to justify that the country's crime rate fell? Policy or not, if the crime rate in the country as a whole fell, then it spreads doubt on the police chief's claim that his policing strategy resulted in crime reduction for his city because it fell everywhere. Maybe it was the decriminalization of certain crimes or improved quality of life for everyone which disincentivized crime.

[XiduoH792]

I really think D is irrelevant. The fact that there is a 30% national decline of crime rate doesn't mean 20% decline of crime rate is not due to police chief's contribution. Circumstances may vary from city to city and maybe it would be extremely hard or nearly impossible to decrease more than 20% crime rate in police chief's city.