Many people think that the only way to remedy the problem of crime is by increasing the number of police officers, bu...

hkarl April 22, 2020

Question on option E

Answer E is insinuating that the number of police officers definitely has a relationship with crime rates, because it says "the number of police officers is not the ONLY influence". But, couldn't it be argued that option E is wrong because it's possible that the number of police officers doesn't actually have ANY influence on crime rates? If the statistics showed that there was no correlation between the number of police officers and crime rates (because even cities where the ratio of police officers to civilians was the same, the crime rates were different), couldn't those statistics also prove that the number of police officers is irrelevant, not just it's not the ONLY influence on crime rate? Using the word "only" insinuates that it's a definite factor to begin with. There's no evidence in the text given that the number of police officers are a definite factor.

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SamA April 26, 2020

Hello @hkarl,

I suppose it is possible that the number of police officers in a given city has absolutely no effect on crime rates. However, the data presented by the author here is not enough for us to make that conclusion.This is exactly why answer choice D is incorrect. The only information we have is a constant rate of police officers, but a wide variation in crime rates. Maybe more policing helps to a certain point, but then other factors become more important. It's still possible that cities without police have much higher levels of crime, well-beyond the variation presented here.

Also, I would argue that "policing has no influence" is contained within "policing is not the only influence." If it has no influence, then it certainly isn't the only influence. You have to consider the argument that the author is responding to. "Many people think that the only way to remedy the problem of crime is by increasing the number of police officers..." To counter this, our author needs to say that more police is not the only way, which explains the wording of answer choice E.