Police chief: During my tenure as chief, crime in this city has fallen by 20 percent. This is clearly the result of m...

Jacob-R on November 11, 2018

I’m happy to help.

As always, let’s start with the question stem. We are looking for an answer which, if true, calls into question the argument in the passage.

What was the argument? The police chief has said: During the chief’s tenure, crime has fallen 20 percent. And the chief concludes that this drop was the result of the chief’s strategy, namely using real time data and focusing resources on areas which most crime.

Therefore, we are looking for an answer that either provides an alternative reason for why crime has fallen, or gives us reason to doubt the chief’s strategy.

Answer A doesn’t do either of those — it just says that crime in the chief’s city is still higher.

Answer B doesn’t directly attack the chief’s argument, but instead just says that the crime rate is higher than it was before the tenure.

Answer C doesn’t call into question the chief’s argument because it simply gives us a more detailed idea of when crime dropped during the chief’s tenure, and doesn’t attack the chief’s explanation for the drop.

Answer D does do one of the things I originally mentioned: it gives an alternate explanation besides the chief’s strategy for why crime in the city has fallen — because crime in the country as a whole has fallen! That is why D is correct.

Answer E just tells us about variance within the city, and doesn’t call into question the police chief’s explanation.

I hope that helps! Please let us know if you have further questions.