Rhetorical Analysis About Police Reform

Police Reform rhetorical analysis

In the article "The Myth about Police Reform". A brief background of cases where the suspect was called by cops are presented. Coates continuously calls upon on the actions taken by police officers and how he believes the situations should have not been handled the way they were. Coates quotes from the 1953 book The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet in order to explain the difference between authority and power. Authority is based on the consent of the government while power is based on externalities and force. With these definitions in mind, he discusses how throughout history, the African-American community have undergone police power and not authority. Ending the article, Coates then makes the claim that

Phrases that he uses in order to give anger are for example; “There are many problems”, “one interrogates”, “this time of heightened concern”, “Do we really want?”, and many more of phrases and questions with the same tone. The pathos used is not very persuasive because of the lack of evidence, and the lack of back ground information. For the most part, Coates uses pathos as his supporting evidence. We can see this in the beginning of the article when he makes the audience question recent police actions as just. He continues by mentioning the names of suspects whom were killed by the police with a little bit of background information to make the audience feel anger towards the situations. Coates asks the questions; “Was Walter Scott’s malfunctioning third-brake light really worth a police encounter?... Do we really want people trained to fight crime dealing with someone who’s ceased taking medications?” Coates makes the claim that experts should handle the situations not only the police, as they are specially trained to handle a suicidal man or a mentally ill one. Coates questions the audience again on whether if sending the police to handle the situations that led to the death of the victims was the right call. Situations should be handled by experts in the field, and that the police are “only women and men who specialize

African Americans throughout most of their history have lived under the power of the crime-justice system according to Coates and not it’s authority. “Nisbet, distinguishes between “power” and “authority” … authority… is a matter of relationships, allegiances, and association… Power…is “external” and “based” upon force.” Although one can imply as to why he makes the argument, he does not provide any evidence or reasoning to back up his claim. One can imply from Coates saying “Power exist where allegiances have decayed or never existed at all. “Power rises,” writes Nesbit,”only when authority breaks down.” That he believes our current system is broken and thus has caused power to arise even though he never makes this claim. He continues his argument by critiquing officers as being citizens too and thus would also lie like any other person about a case like in the case of Micheal Brown, and how politicians defend officers and categories them as “most of them are good”. No evidence to these statements are presented to support his claim. His last use of logos is questioning the expertise of officers under certain circumstances. He makes the police officer fight crime. They are not health professionals, case-workers or teachers and they should not handle situations that require expertise in those fields. He reasoning behind this is that “why