Many people think that the only way to remedy the problem of crime is by increasing the number of police officers, but recent statistics show that many major cities had similar ratios of police officers to citizens, yet diverged widely in their crime rates. The statistics cited function in the argument to ['illustrate the need for increasing the number of police officers in major cities', 'suggest that the number of police officers is not the only influence on the crime rate', 'demonstrate that there is no relation between the number of police officers and the crime rate', 'prove that there are factors other than the number of police officers that are more important in reducing the crime rate']