> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police department, Whitehead said.
I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.
> More than 200 schools across Britain are using CCTV cameras in pupils' toilets or changing rooms, according to figures obtained by anti-surveillance campaigners, who warned that the research raised serious questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.
> A total of 825 cameras were located in the toilets or changing rooms of 207 schools across England, Scotland and Wales, according to data provided by more than 2,000 schools.
[...]
> Responses from 2,107 secondary schools and academies showed they used 47,806 cameras overall, including 26,887 inside school buildings.
That's an average of 22 cameras per school, so clearly there is progress to be made, but cameras in the lockers and bathrooms must be worth more points.
What a complete waste of money. It's as if they actually expect the cops to sit down and continuously monitor all 200 cameras all day. Horrible waste of tax money on two fronts.
Also, say some cop does happen to see a kid walking out of school at 1:30. It's not like he's going to get all alerted and call the school to figure out the situation. No he's going to think "There goes some kid ... probably called out by his parents" and that's the end of that.
Of course this means they just need to spend more money on more technology.
You have to start integrating the cameras with face recognition, RFID chips, and of course you have a system that knows when every student is SUPPOSED to leave. (Of course, this necessarily means both a permanent record and live feed of e.g. every student's medical appointments will be created.)
And then of course if there aren't enough officers to monitor the cameras continuously, that means you have to increase taxes to hire more officers. After all, they're American heroes, being strong and brave to protect the innocent -- we all need to do our bit to support them. And think of who they're protecting in this case -- the children! Everyone's concerned about the welfare of children...
I don't see why we're so uptight about children's safety anyway. Sure, some get kidnapped and murdered, or molested or beat up or whatever, but 99.999999% of kids seem to do okay. Sure, it sucks if your kid is one of the .0000001%, but there's a lot of things that suck in this world if they happen to you, but they are so uncommon that we don't (and shouldn't) waste any time worrying about them.
Expressing concern for childrens' safety activates the "child-in-danger = I'd-better-do-something" reflex that evolution's built into us.
Therefore, politicians, marketers, and other "spin" people who want to build support for a certain agenda will say "We need to do this to protect your children." Because it works -- it convinces people emotionally, if their reasoning capability is poorly developed or not engaged.
Most people are statistically illiterate; they don't understand probability. And our intuitions about this sort of thing were evolved when news spread by word-of-mouth; they do very poorly in an age where everybody hears about very rare events thanks to worldwide radio, TV and Internet coverage. Bruce Schneier has a very insightful essay on this topic [1].
