Rhetorical Analysis Of I Am A Cop

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There has been a tension between police and communities of colored people for a long time, but the issue that hit a breaking point was the series of police officers killing unarmed black people. In recent news, racism in profiling and actions that made by police officers have occurred more frequently, even weekly after the Michael Brown’s case – an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer in Missouri – which drew even more attention to this controversial topic and got the entire nation involved. In an article titled “I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me”, a seventeen-year veteran police officer Sunil Dutta, analyzes and approaches the problem using pathos as his main strategy. Yet, his argument …show more content…

He gets all of the nasty curses, screaming, yelling in his face and some aggressively threatening behaviors that invade his safety zone. As a result, he uses force that he would not otherwise use if everyone cooperates when being stopped. Based on this information, he gains emotional reaction from his audiences. He tries to persuade the readers that he is not the one who starts the conflict first and indirectly attributes his force to any inappropriate actions. Besides, he describes one situation in which he helped “a belligerent man who had doused his car with gallons of gas and was about to create a firebomb at a busy mall filled with holiday shoppers.”(Dutta) He quickly processed the situation and gave a fast response to the event. He “distracted (the man) with a hook about his family and his loved ones, and (he) disengaged it without hurting anyone.”(Dutta) This story demonstrates that policemen could develop methods and strategies to calm down an aggressive person without using physical strength as long as they comply with the request. However, his argument is weakened as he only expresses his opinion from his perspective. Moreover, the lack of statistics or data is unable to prove the reliability of his personal evidence. How many times does a typical police officer could convince an armed individual to drop his weapon without shouting, pointing a gun at, or using physical force on him? How many times are forces used even when individual that gets stopped cooperates with the police’s request? Hence, he makes another fallacy by using his own experience and story as data. Due to that, it is insufficient for him to draw any