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Notes -
I don't (though of course neither are the specifics of each crime as in one was a premeditated murder, the other was felony murder by juveniles while trying to steal a car) but that wasn't the claim you made. You said charges dropped. If you want to pivot to a different argument then feel free. But if your evidence does not support your specific claim then do better at writing your claims or picking your evidence.
Dueling anecdotes is a bad debating technique for a number of reasons, but if you are going to use it, you have to be very very tight on making sure your examples match your claims. Otherwise you will get bogged down in defending the specifics of each case. It can be rhetorically powerful but it is very difficult to use correctly. If you don't use it properly it hurts your argument because it looks like you are either over-claiming on what your evidence shows, or were just googling headlines that kind of matched your thesis. You should then expect to get called out on that. Or you can be aware of that in advance and construct better arguments, which leads to better engagement.
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