TOW 29: Cleveland Police Criticised as City Asks: Why Were Women Not Found Sooner?

Although the media has been bombarding us only with the good news of rescuing the three young woman after ten years of captivity, there is a small detail that it has missed. The Cleveland police was called multiple times after multiple reports of strange happenings at the location where the young women were, and the police even personally visited the house two times. This has led to widespread criticism for the police department's lack of care, that they were unable to detect that there were three kidnapped women in that very home.

The article is from The Guardian, written by Tom McCarthy in the U.S. and Ed Pilkington in Cleveland. Both are reporters, and The Guardian is a credible source.

This article was significant in context. With the recent news of the three young women being found after ten long years, this article tells of and criticizes the police department's failure to recognize that there were women being held at the house they visited several times.This article tells a slightly different story than the ones that are being told on the news.

The purpose of this article was to reveal that although the news of the rescuing of the women is great, the police are partially at fault for not rescuing them sooner. Even after many different reports and calls to the police department to check out the strange home, not enough was done by the police.

The audience of the article is the general public, as this article aims to tell of a minimally known fact behind this case.

In order to gain credibility that the police had failed to properly act, the article utilized ethos by including testimonies from those that had actually called to report strange behavior at the house. Several people were quoted and they told of what they had witnessed and that they had called. This usage of direct quotes was used to get across the message that the police had not taken the reports seriously, which led to the prolonged stay of the three women at their kidnapper's home.

The author's purpose was achieved. The police department's failure to act quickly and efficiently was displayed as several people testified that they had called. In addition, this article was interesting in that the news and media sites did not tell of such a backstory but instead only revealed the happy reunion of the women with their families.