enthalpy

Saturday, January 24, 2004


I know the tinfoil-hat crowd will cry "big brother" and "invasion of privacy" when they read about a small, rural high school putting in surveillance cameras, but that's not the most upsetting thing about this story.
Camera surveillance systems have helped solve, among other crimes, arson at Galveston's Ball High School and purse theft at Dickinson High School, officials said. The electronic watchdog systems at times help pinpoint the aggressors in hallway fights and prove to parents that the children they believe to be paragons of virtue do indeed misbehave once in a while.
Let's forget for a moment that the $85,000 they're planning to spend on these cameras is more than the most taxpayers in SFISD make in a year. These cameras aren't even intended to protect the children. They're meant to protect the school. A grand "cover your ass" implementation of surveillance. It's not like there's someone monitoring all these cameras real-time and are using them to prevent any malfeasance. It's just going to be used after the fact to identify suspects and to protect the school from further liability.

But on the bright side, the cameras, along with the metal detectors, will prepare the students for their lives after graduation. When they're incarcerated.



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