I spy...a biased attack on the Police

As an advocate of complete equality and human rights for all humans (all races, religions, gender etc.) as well as a critic of the history of police discrimination and brutality, I decided to do something a little different. I wanted to try to find an article with agendas I for the most part agree with, but find the logical fallacies in it to see if I was able to point out flaws in something that's on my own side. (It's a great exercise in objectiveness.)

I took a look at the article called "US police spied on muslims, African Americans" and found several fallacies we have already discussed among the article.


1. One sidedness-
As I am sure we can all agree/admit, we can all tend to biased in our political views and that can frequently effect our perception of facts. In this article, Al Jazeera asserts many things against the Boston police department as it was discovered that they were using surveillance technology and using specific search words to target specific people groups. While all of this may be (and probably is) true, the issue is that the author is being very one sided in only attacking. It is also important to note that the only source used was a Civil Liberties Union. Which is fine...if additional more objective sources were also used to support thier side.

2. Bandwagon
In another section of the article, they claim that there is a total "lack of transparency" in the Boston Police department. However, there is no proof of this at all. In fact, the only cause to think such things is because whenever the police do something we feel is violating our rights, we are shocked that it was happening and assume that it was done in secret. We shouldn't be so shocked by now. Police brutality is a real thing and no one is hiding it from anyone. But the article just jumps on a bandwagon without actually stating that this surveillance information was even hidden or done in secret. In fact, it was a very public thing because in the years prior there had already been debate and backlash to certain surveillance programs. So, the public know that's there is surveillance, they know thier social media is being watched and searched for key words. This isn't new, and its definitely transparent.


http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/police-spied-muslims-african-americans-aclu-180207195516053.html