Budget constraints have made police officials consider reassigning a

Premise: Reducing the officers from traffic enforcement will be counterproductive because some serious crimes can be stopped before by the traffic police officers.
We need to strengthen this. Option C tells us that the people committing serious crimes pay no heed to traffic laws and thus can be nabbed by the officers. If the number of traffic police officers are reduced, then there are less chances that such people would be caught.
Option A just talks about violent confrontation, but it does not tell why the move of reducing officers will be counter productive.

Does this help?

Criminals, while committing crimes, use cars.
Traffic police can search when stopping a car for a traffic violation. They might find evidence of serious crime during search.

So, do not reassign traffic policemen to serious crime.

The argument depends on traffic policemen being able to find serious crime while carrying out their duty as traffic policemen. The argument will not make a lot of sense if those carrying out serious crime do not break traffic rules. Then they will not be stopped and searched and hence the argument falls apart.

What strengthens the argument? If something tells us that serious criminals often break traffic rules so they would be stopped for traffic offences. Then a search would be carried out and evidence found.

(C) Those willing to break the law to commit serious crimes are often in committing such crimes unwilling to observe what they regard as the lesser constraints of traffic law.
This tells us that criminals often break traffic rules while carrying out crime. Then it makes it more likely that traffic police will stop them.
So the argument makes sense that we shouldn't reassign traffic policemen to serious crime.

(A) An officer who stops a car containing evidence of the commission of a serious crime risks a violent confrontation, even if the vehicle was stopped only for a traffic violation.

Violent confrontation is irrelevant.

(B) When the public becomes aware that traffic enforcement has lessened, it typically becomes lax in obeying traffic rules.

We need a connect between traffic rule breaking and serious crime.

(D) The offenders committing serious crimes who would be caught because of traffic violations are not the same group of individuals as those who would be caught if the arresting officers were reassigned from traffic enforcement.

It doesn't matter whether the same individuals will be caught. Some kind of serious criminals will be caught.

(E) The great majority of persons who are stopped by officers for traffic violations are not guilty of any serious crimes.

Irrelevant whether the majority of people stopped will be serious criminals or a small fraction. We need to see how many criminals will be stopped.

Answer (C)
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Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument given?

A. A single incident can't be taken as an example
B. We have to focus, here we are dealing with criminals, not public!
C. Strengthens the argument given
D. It distracts by saying there are two types of criminals caught, followed by description of their crimes.
E. Again far away from the topic, mostly deals with public.

Conclusion: Reducing Traffic enforcement is counter productive.
Premise: Criminals tend to use cars when committing serious crimes.

Assumption: Criminals using cars can be quickly detected.

Something which supports this assumption will strengthen the arguments.

Here is the Official explanation.

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First , as for any CR problem lets break down the problem :

Conclusion : Shifting of Traffic officers to work on serious crimes would not prove fruitful.
Premise : Police force needs more officers to work on serious crimes and police officials from Traffic enforcement are being shifted for this cause. Why -> because traffic officials can catch Traffic violators and search for evidence of serious crimes in the car.

One should always pre-think some sort of answer before moving on to the answer choices.
In this case what can one pre-think ??
Pre-thinking - Evidence that shows that traffic police officers actually catch criminals who have committed serious crimes.

A An officer who stops a car containing evidence of the commission of a serious crime risks a violent confrontation, even if the vehicle was stopped only for a traffic violation. -> This if any weakens our conclusion as if traffic police officers risk violent confrontation then they actually would actually be discouraged to search vehicles.
B When the public becomes aware that traffic enforcement has lessened, it typically becomes lax in obeying traffic rules. -> This option choice does not affect our conclusion. It does not talk about serious crimes in any way.
C Those willing to break the law to commit serious crimes are often in committing such crimes unwilling to observe what they regard as the lesser constraints of traffic law. -> Correct -> Because this actually gives evidence that Traffic police officials would actually search these cars which have serious crime offenders.
D The offenders committing serious crimes who would be caught because of traffic violations are not the same group of individuals as those who would be caught if the arresting officers were reassigned from traffic enforcement. -> The question that we need to answer is that whether reassigning Traffic police officers to crime department would actually increase or decrease the number of criminals caught. This option choice does not help answer that in any way and hence is incorrect.
E The great majority of persons who are stopped by officers for traffic violations are not guilty of any serious crimes. -> This option choice again does not help answer the conclusion in any way as explained in option choice D.

Hope this helps !!!!

mike - Could you please explain option C :unwilling to observe what they regard as the lesser constraints of traffic law:

Hi siddy,

I'll give it a try

I broke down the sentence (option C) into three parts-

1. Those willing to break the law to commit serious crimes = People committing serious crimes
2. are often in committing such crimes = when they are committing these serious crimes
3. unwilling to observe what they regard as the lesser constraints of traffic law = they do not observe the traffic laws (so they break traffic laws too) and think that breaking traffic laws is a lesser limiting factor than committing serious crimes.

Combining the meaning of the three parts- When people commit serious crimes, they also break traffic laws and they think that breaking traffic laws is a lesser constraint than committing serious crimes.

I hope this helps.

Aiena.

Hi Expert,

Could you please explain why D is wrong. I think as criminals won't be caught because of reassignment, it is a strengthener

torto, let's compare your paraphrasing (in bold above), to the answer choice as written:


The answer choice identifies two groups of offenders: those who would be caught because of traffic violations, and those who would be caught if arresting officers were moved off of traffic enforcement into some other role.

We know from the passage that offenders have a "tendency... to use cars when engaged in the commission of serious crimes." What we don't know is how many offenders would be caught in a traffic stop, versus how many would be caught by those officers if they were reassigned elsewhere. So, we cannot conclude that this answer choice will strengthen the argument of the passage.

Your rewording of the answer choice only addresses one of the two groups: the criminals who will not be caught. Be careful when you paraphrase, because it is easy to leave out useful stuff.

I hope this helps!
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Dear Expert/ GMATNinja,

I do not understand why the answer is not A - isn't that the point? Police officer stopping a car containing evidence of the commission of a serious crime IS exactly what he wants. And so what if he faces a violent confrontation, what kind of police who wants to find and confront criminals is afraid of violent confrontation?

Isn't the possibility of stopping a car that contains evidence of the commission of a serious crime THE EXACT REASON why we should not reduce the number of traffic enforcement officers (so that they can stop as many cars that contain crime evidence as possible)?

Thank you!

To correctly answer this question, we have to strengthen support for the conclusion of the argument. So, let's identify the conclusion.

Conclusion: Reducing traffic enforcement for this reason would be counterproductive (to the goal of increasing the number of officers working on serious crimes).

We need information that strengthens the support for that conclusion.

Here's (A).

(A) An officer who stops a car containing evidence of the commission of a serious crime risks a violent confrontation, even if the vehicle was stopped only for a traffic violation.

All (A) describes what happens IF an officer stops a car containing evidence of a serious crime. (A) does not say that officers on traffic duty WILL or ARE LIKELY TO stop cars containing such evidence. So, (A) provides no reason to keep officers on traffic duty rather than reassign them to working directly on serious crime.
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Hi VeritasKarishma

I got this wrong and chose option 'B'. I can see now why option 'C' is the right answer, but I am unable to understand the gap in my logic for choosing option 'B'.
As per 'B', there will be a higher number of traffic violations now and since we have fewer traffic policemen left, because of their movement to crime, we will not have adequate traffic policemen to handle this increase in traffic violations, leading to people committing serious crimes to abscond (probability becomes higher) as the traffic police would now be busy in handling increased number of violations.

These serious crime committers would have been caught if the traffic policemen numbers would not have been reduced.

Hope I was able to explain my reasoning clearly.

Thanks
Saurabh

(B) tells us that reassigning policemen to serious crime will lead to increase in traffic violations. It has no connection with increase in serious crime. The agenda right now is to reduce serious crime by reassigning instead of hiring due to budget constraints.
This option gives us no connection between traffic crime and serious crime. Hence we don't understand why moving traffic policemen to serious crime is counterproductive to the intent of reducing serious crime.

Option (C) explains that it is easy to identify serious criminals because they commit traffic crimes too. Hence moving would be counterproductive.
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Hi - is my understanding of (d) accurate ?

I think (D) is a weakener -- it is 'PRODUCTIVE' (not Counter-productive) to reassign traffic enforcement officers to work on serious crimes only.



Group 1 (in Yellow) - these criminals are being caught by Traffic police (from the pool of traffic police, that has recently been reduced in Number, because of Budget constraints).

Group 2 (In Blue) -- Traffic enforcement officers have been re-assigned to work on serious crimes only.

Now these Re-assigned officers (from traffic enforcement officers to Serious Crimes division) are catching CRIMINALS.

As per (d) -- Group 1 and Group 2 are DIFFERENT

What is the implication ?

The implication is -->

Traffic police officers [from this smaller pool of Traffic police officers] -- are catching DIFFERENT CRIMINALS -- than the ones -- reassigned officers are catching

Hence, it would fair to assume -- criminals in group 2 ARE GOING IN CARS (but not breaking any car speeding laws)