Statist pro-traffic ticket piece

[geoff]

After all, they do catch those with drugs and guns, says the article.

http://www.slate.com/id/2226509/?yahoo=y

[Ogre]

Excellent propaganda piece.

They lay out statistics first that sound scary: 89 police killed, 600,000 assaulted.

Of course, that's in a 10-year period. Oh, and its with over 22 million traffic stops. As a percentage, that's 0.00000003% of traffic stops that result in a policeman's death, and 0.0002% of stops that result in policemen attacked. Conveniently left out is the number of innocent people who were killed or attacked by policemen. Good luck finding those numbers, of course.

Then, the article quickly uses anecdotal evidence to "support" their numbers, suggesting that most traffic stops result in the seizure of guns and drugs from the trunk -- which, of course, is an illegal search in many cases.

Then the article quickly changes continents and uses data from a country unlike America and implies that all statistics gathered in England apply to America, despite both countries having radically different laws. And the implication is clear: male drivers are criminals, and only by allowing police to stop any car at any time for any reason will these criminals be stopped.

The article continues this false comparison, going further to emphatically state that in one specific time period that since the NYPD handed out 11% less speeding tickets, that this was the direct and only cause of an 11% increase in fatalities. Of course, this is false logic.

Of course, the author did donate $500 to Obama. And it is published on Slate. So as long as people read it as the fiction that it is, there's no problem. Sadly, too many will read it and assume it contains factual, reliable information.