Quote (Thor123422 @ 27 Jul 2020 05:05)
I'm taking GRE practice tests since I'm considering doing a biomedical engineering Ph.D, so I'm gonna write my response in the style of a GRE asses the argument essay, but without going through all the same steps to clean it up for a professional grader.
Your response relies on a few assumptions about my argument that aren't necessarily true.
The first assumption is that damage is equal regardless of who does it. I disagree with this. I think the police doing damage is fundamentally more damaging than equal physical damage done by a civilian. Damage done by a civilian is just a civilian's damage. Damage done by the police reflects on them as an institution, and since they need the trust of the public to do their job and maintain legitimacy of the people, from whom their power derives, it is fundamentally more damaging to the cause of justice and preventative measures to allow the police to do damage.
The second assumption is that the police using these tactics are preventing violence. This is not a supported assumption since the police have been using these tactics, and in many cases it has only emboldened the rioters. When you have a clear enemy using violent tactics it will lead to more violent reaction by the other side. In my city personally, there have been a ton of protests and virtually no property damage, and I live pretty close to Ferguson. The police response here has been tame, and I attribute part of that to the fact that the police never got involved to quell protests the way we have seen in places like Buffalo and Seattle.
The third assumption is that there are individual "bad apples" among the police. This actually betrays the entire idea of the "bad apple" turn of phrase. The turn of phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch", not "one bad apple can be picked out and the rest of the bunch is fine". There is a systemic problem with the police, and sending a message that tools will be removed if they cannot be used without damaging the problem is one way to stop abuse using those tools. This is fine IMO if it is done by elected officials who are directly accountable to the public, such as in this case. The public has a vested interest in how they are policed, and if they don't like this move they will certainly turn around and fix the problem next election, or instigate other measures as allowed by the process.
Conclusion conclusion conclusion... blah blah blah, restate things and conclude with something quippy about how a political process exists for a reason.
Just real quick: your first point is smart and something I hadnt even considered. Unfortunately, it doesnt hold up in the face of the actual numbers:
In 2019, there were about 1000 people shot to death by the police, and over 15000 people killed with firearms (excluding suicides) altogether. See:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/https://www.thetrace.org/2020/01/gun-deaths-2019-increase/For simplicities sake, let's make an assumption extremely favorable to your argument: assume that all those 1k people shot by the police were actually
murdered - even then, we'd still sit at a 14 to 1 ratio. Yes, someone being murdered by the police is causing greater damage to the fabric of society than someone killed by a civilian, but one murder by cops certainly is not worth 14 or more deaths by civilian murderers. And then again, this ratio came from an extremely broad assumption - if we factor in all the cases where the police shot someone in self-defense, to prevent harm to others, or where a cop made a genuine mistake, the numbers become even more lopsided.
Regarding your third point: "one bad apple spoils the bunch" is certainly not the argument you want to apply to violence in the wake of the BLM protests, or to black crime in general. I dont see a way to make a coherent argument that one bad apple spoils the bunch when it comes to the police, but not when it comes to BLM.
Regarding your second point: it's inherently (close to) impossible to quantify the amount of crime/murders prevented by police work, which makes it tough to have a substantive debate about this.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 29 2020 03:58am