If you heard that more police officers had been arrested than had ever arrested anyone, would it really matter much if those police officers had been arrested as teenagers, or on the job? It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent. Not because they're particularly criminal, but because they are particularly useless.
> It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent.
Whether that's problematic depends on a lot of things, including whether arresting people is actually the main benefit of them being present.
I have a few dogs. They bark at people walking by on the sidewalk a lot. I've never had someone break into my house. Are the dogs useless as a mechanism to prevent home invasion or burglary, or does knowledge of their presence prevent people from even attempting such? Now consider that I haven't noted whether those crimes are common in my area or not.
Maybe those dogs have growled at guests in my house, making them feel uncomfortable. Should my stance be that they've growled at more guests than intruders they've attacked? Do you feel comfortable making a definitive statement on the value of those dogs and whether the costs outweigh the benefits with the given information, or do you think additional information would be important to discerning that?
At the point at which your dogs have broken into and robbed your neighbor's house more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into; that's the point at which you can compare your dogs to the Air Marshal service.
> more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into
The whole point is that you can't tell whether that's happened with the data presented, regardless of what you compare it to, and no, once is not too many times given the actual thing we're discussing.
If the existence of Air Marshals prevented one more 9/11 type event from happening, or even a few failed attempts (which would be capitalized on by politicians to push their own agendas), then I would without reservation say they are worth it. We just haven't been presented with that data. In some cases it may not exist. Acting like the answer to that is irrelevant is not the correct way to go about it though, in my opinion.
Context is important, lest you prime your reader to make unsupported conclusions. Imagine if instead of doing this to police officers, we insinuated things about arrestees instead.
No, context can be important. If all context were important, you couldn't talk about one thing without talking about every other thing. If your argument about why context is important in this case rests on if a hypothetical fact that "people arrested by police have collectively prevented more crimes than they have committed" would be uninteresting or even unfair without context, I'd deeply disagree.
