.Would Security Guards Have Mattered?

The Chron splashed a story across the front page today, revealing that the City of Oakland had failed to follow through on a plan to deploy private security guards in East Oakland. It’s a good, solid story, but it didn’t deserve the treatment the paper gave it. By blasting it across Page One, as part of the paper’s coverage of the police slayings, the editors led readers to believe that the guards might have affected last weekend’s tragic incident. But that’s a pretty unlikely scenario. In fact, no one in the story even made that claim.