On July 25, 2007, Newark Councilman Ronald Rice sent the school district a memo which outlined several issues requiring attention, including the urgent need for a new lock on the schoolyard gate at Mount Vernon Elementary School. Without that security, Rice wrote “[the schoolyard] may be a potential location for illegal activity or a crime waiting to occur.”
Sounds eerily prescient (the “Newark Schoolyard Killings” took place on August 4, 2007), but I wonder how many letters like that city officials get in a year, and whether it would be cost-effective to respond to them all. Maybe NJ.COM is just the victim of “attentional bias.”