Reasoning happens two ways, deductively or inductively.  The difference between the two can vary, but if you don’t think too hard about it, the latter can make almost as much sense as the former to the unwary.  And when used to pitch a concept, it almost makes it seem legit. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and his trusty sidekick, Mayor Bill de Blasio, depend on it.

On Tuesday, NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton responded to knife fear. As part of a new operation helpfully dubbed “Cutting Edge,” officers will be deployed to hotspot locations and will track the incidents separately from other felony assaults.

There have been a few spectacularly horrible random knife attacks in New York City, and it’s given rise to what people do best: fear.  And there were 900 knife attacks already this year!  Oh my god, it’s an epidemic. We’re all gonna die. Except we’re not.

The same can’t be said for several of the instances of blade-related violence that have darkened what has otherwise been a relatively safe year in New York City. Although a healthy chunk of the over 900 knife-related attacks so far in 2016 have been connected with domestic violence, it’s the ones that occur seemingly without rhyme or reason that have people on edge. In January, at least six people were slashed on the subway, and the first few months of this year have seen local media outlets freak out about attacks inside restaurants, outside hospitals, and in the middle of the street.

That there have been random slashings is certainly disconcerting. But converting the fear of being a victim of a random knife attack to making knives the tool of the devil, and therefore creating a program to rid the City of killer knives is backwards. We want to end the slashings.  We’ll have a tough time cutting steak, performing a million ordinary chores, living, without knives.

New York City is about as knife-unfriendly as a place can be.  That’s because police really hate weapons of any sort. Not their weapons, of course, because they’re highly trained professionals who use weapons safely and only when absolutely necessary.  But we can’t be trusted.  While ordinary, law-abiding people have routinely carried pocket knives for centuries, elsewhere, New York is the mother lode of knife fear. Something must be done.

This is basically a test of the city’s predictive policing program, which was launched on a pilot basis last summer and is all about using the numbers to deploy cops smartly. As Politico reports, Commissioner Bratton thinks this micro-targeting strategy—which expands on longstanding initiatives like COMPSTAT that closely track crime data—is the future of American policing. For example, because the numbers say slashings are most likely to occur between 7 PM and 4 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, more officers will be posted up outside of nightclubs and bars.

Does that mean you need to be concerned about cops seizing the knife great grandpappy bought from Tiffanys in the ’90s (the other ’90s)?  Don’t be silly. They won’t be watching you nightclubbers like hawks on Sutton Place. Compstat says that it’s not merely about hours of operation, but locations as well. Like, oh, above 125th Street. Anything sound familiar about this?

De Blasio and Bratton—who both like to say stop and frisk is largely in the rearview—may see that stat thrown at them as they continue to contend with knife panic.

Whereas the rationale for stop and frisk was to get guns off the street, random slashing fear has given rise to the same issues, only this time for knives. Which makes it entirely different. To this end, Bratton has come up with a really cool name for the operation, Cutting Edge.  And combined with the pretense of empiricism, how can anyone argue with the logic?

Except, of course, for the fact that the logic only makes sense if you look at the handful of slashings inductively, so that fear of knife attack can be used to justify the need to eradicate blades and reinstitute stop and frisk.

While it’s unclear what exactly is driving this statistically curious and anecdotally disturbing spike in knife violence, it could, perversely, be used to slow police reform. After stop and frisk was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013 because it unfairly subjected minorities to random checks, the NYPD massively curtailed the practice. But according to research from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, city cops confiscated nearly 47,000 knifes with the legally problematic tactic between 2003 and 2012.

The judge who held stop and frisk unconstitutional, Shira Scheindlin, is stepping down.  As for the critical research conducted by the John Jay College of Shoe Repair and Coppery, those 47,000 knifes weren’t killer knives, or slasher knives, or even illegal knives, but the same knives that are carried by people everywhere else without any indication of harm, intent to cause harm or any harm at all. They’re ordinary knives used for ordinary knife-type things. But in New York, knives are inherently evil, and so they track the number of knives seized as if that number means anything more than that the cops steal people’s knives for no reason.

To appreciate the poverty of the logic, imagine a rash of random boot-kickings, where six people walking down the street, minding their own business, get kicked by someone wearing boots. Panic ensues, so the police decide to eradicate the blight of boots. The commissioner comes up with a cool name for the operation, Kick The Boot, and promises to find evil boot-wearing people and take away their killer boots. Problem solved.

The commissioner cranks up his Compstat machine, tells young professionals on Wall Street not to worry, and deploys his army to where and when the stats say boot kickings are most likely to happen, and announces that the citizens are going to be safe from the plague of boot kickings.  Everyone gives a sigh of relief, provided they live below 110th Street. For those who don’t, there is always sneakers, because they will be stopped, thrown against a wall, have their boots seized and be arrested for attempted boot kicking if they go out after dark wearing boots.

Does this calm your fears of slashings?  Does this really make sense, that a tool used by everyone, needed by everyone, should be vilified as if it’s inherently evil, and used to justify a return to unconstitutional police seizure? Rather than taking comfort in “Cutting Edge,” we would do better to think harder and cut it out.