Newspaper Commentary Critique

In "What Racial Profiling Means" by Leonard Pitts Jr. from the Sept. 29th 2010 issue of the Miami Herald, the author gives an insightful opinion on the process of how police officers determine who they pull over on highways and for what reason. I think that this article's author's intended audience is simply the general population, and not any specific group of people. It is to inform the likes of everybody. This article's author's credibility seems to be just, and appears to come from a real space. The way in which it is told doesn't strike one as, amidst reading it, a made up account. The argument made is supported by the claim that police officers, in order to make 'drug busts' and not simply arrest drunk drivers or speeders, look for dark-skinned people that may seem suspicious in their vehicles or who look like they could be drug smuggling. The evidence given is that 90 percent of the arrests the previous year by the state police on the Turnpike were black or Hispanic. Another piece of information was that the way which the police force made those busts, the veteran cops taught the young ones, was to "think dark," in other words, find reasons to stop drivers with brown skin. The logic used to explain this phenomena was in a very matter-of-fact way in which the author described real life instances that he was told about to support his "claim", if one can really call it that. Really, it is just a fact.