Police and their Choices in Getting a COVID Vaccine

After reading the article carefully, use your knowledge of English 1C analysis devices to answer the following questions in complete, well-organized essay form. Quote phrases from the article to support your analysis. Remember: a good analysis explains enough so a reader who hasn’t read the original article knows what you’re critiquing and why, but at the same time, it is organized around your own thesis about the article, and is not a summary of the article point by point.
Suggested format
1. Introduction: Identify the author, his/her purpose for writing, conclusion, and target audience. State your thesis evaluating the overall strength or weakness of the author’s arguments and a brief reason why, not your personal feelings about the issue.
2. Body: Identify author’s support points—the premises and evidence used to support the conclusion—using brief quoted examples as references.
a. Set out the strengths—
i. What points best support the thesis?
ii. What kinds of reasoning does the author use (statistics, analogies, cause/effect reasoning)? Other persuasive devices?
b. Set out the weaknesses—
i. Are there fallacies (label them), contradictions, omissions, unsupported claims, unwarranted assumptions, non-credible references, biased language?
3. Conclusion: Assess and respond to the persuasiveness of the writing. Give specific examples for your statements. Remember, you can acknowledge that an argument is strong even though you may not agree with it, or acknowledge that an argument is weak even though you do agree with it. When you answer 3b and c below, remember to tie your remarks to your assessment of the author’s argument. This is not an essay about your own opinion on the essay topic.
a. Do the strengths outweigh the weaknesses?
b. How does the author’s argument conclusion compare with your own about the issue?
c. Did this article change your views on the issue in any way?
4. As an alternative to the regular 1C essay format, if you choose to do so, you may format your essay as a reply to the author or letter to the editor. Either way, remember your job is to use good writing skills to present a clear, complete analysis.
SCORING: The majority of your score on the 6-point English 1C Scoring Guide will depend on your analysis of the author’s logic in Nos. 2a and 2b above, using logic terms and concepts we’ve studied throughout the semester. Your personal feelings on the issue should only appear in Nos. 3b and 3c. Remember, evaluating an argument's strength does not depend on whether or not you agree with it, but on the quality of its reasoning, amount of evidence, and absence of fallacies.
Exams that refer to the author briefly but consist mainly of your own opinion or argument on the issue will not qualify for scores above the 3 (D+) level. Exams that find all strengths and identify no specific weaknesses or specific fallacies, and exams that find all weaknesses and no strengths, will not qualify for scores above the 3.5 (C) level.
Article -
If Police Would Rather Quit Than Get a COVID Vaccine, We'll Be Better Off Without Them
By Antonio Vera
San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 30, 2021
Police officers in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles and various cities have launched a war against COVID vaccine mandates, threatening to resign their jobs. Some in the media are manufacturing a panic, predicting that this “serious shortage of officers” will be the downfall of public safety. But if some police officers want to leave because they don’t want to take the vaccine, we should let them.
Police are viewed by many as critical to our security and addressing homelessness, domestic violence, prostitution, bullying at school, and neighborhood violence. But as a Dept. of Justice professor at Sonoma State University who has studied law enforcement strategies for a decade, I find that policing can either be useful in specific situations or else create great harm. For instance, police presence at schools is supposed to curb violence. But having a police officer on site at Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 didn’t prevent the mass shooting that left 17 people dead — nor did an officer’s presence nearly 20 years earlier at Columbine.
In addition to being ineffective, school officers cause harmful unintended consequences. According to the Brookings Institution, schools with in-house officers are more likely to refer noncriminal offenses to the police — such as throwing a paper airplane, kicking a trash can or wearing sagging pants — which morph into arrests and higher dropout rates and impact students with disabilities. Many studies have also shown racial disparities in school arrests with Black students experiencing disproportionately higher levels of arrests.
In instances where police are called to help an individual in a mental health crisis, the results are not better. A 2020 study by the National Institutes of Health shows that 32% of victims killed by the police had experienced mental health problems. Meanwhile, a 2015 study found that individuals with an untreated mental illness were 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. During the pandemic, numerous stories of botched encounters between police and individuals experiencing a mental health crisis abound.
The benefits of police arrests in domestic violence situations have long been questionable. In the early 1990s the U.S. Justice Department concluded that arrest “does not have a consistent deterrent effect on abusers.” Lawrence Sherman, the architect of the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment, was also quoted around the same time saying that “mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases may cause more violence against women,” after a careful evaluation of arrest practices in several cities. Today, those conclusions still hold. A 2021 study found that 32% of arrestees repeat domestic violence.
When it comes to the welfare of children whose parents are arrested, the outlook is also grim. In a study of policing in North Carolina, Villanova University researchers found that arrests “significantly increased child poverty rates.” When incarcerated parents return to their families from prison, their criminal record is a societal death sentence that undermines employment opportunities, education, housing and successful reintegration to society.
But Nancy Lemon of the San Diego Police Officers’ Association defies these statistics and claims law enforcement saves lives. “For centuries, we did not criminalize domestic violence in the U.S., and women were killed at extremely high rates. The Violence Policy Center reports a rise in domestic violence homicides in this country in the past five years, with the highest rates among Black women. The risk of fatal attacks in domestic violence calls is too high to ask mental health professionals to be the first responders. Eliminating police during a pandemic would accelerate domestic violence to unprecedented levels and lead to thousands of deaths.”
So should we stop calling the police in emergency situations? No. Allowing the police to specialize in the intervention of narrowly defined serious offenses such as crimes in progress is a better use of state resources than expanding the scope of the police.
Instead we should leverage public health, not criminal justice models, to address incidents of mental illness, chronic domestic violence or noncompliant youth. San Francisco is experimenting with Crisis Response Teams of mental health professionals that assess threats, are trained with de-escalation techniques and can call the police if needed. If the 150 vaccine hesitant officers in San Jose resign, a whopping $15 million in salaries and benefits could be used to subsidize at least 300 mental health professionals.
Moreover, evidence is growing that officers who refuse to comply with mandatory vaccination may be among the ones least up to the challenge of responsible policing. A recent study in the U.K. on the psychological profile of vaccine-hesitant individuals found them to possess more negative views of immigrants, lower levels of altruism, higher levels of social dominance and authoritarianism — qualities often associated with aggressive police. “That study is irrelevant,” retorts Lemon. “Police officers are simply exercising their constitutional and employee union rights to resist unlawful mandates from the government.”
But public safety officers have no right to endanger public safety by defying mandates and bringing violent solutions to every problem. Let them leave. While staff shortages are undesirable in most professions, in law enforcement a reduction of officers can improve public safety. A leaner police force will not result in an apocalyptic increase in crime — in the long run, less police intervention will be better for everyone.