Cooperstown Central School to Vote on Surveillance Cameras
Cooperstown Central School in Cooperstown, NY will decide next week on whether to implement surveillance cameras that will monitor continuously the inside and outside of the school building, reports the Cooperstown Crier:
“The world has changed enough where incidents occur and if there’s no first hand reference” resolving an issue becomes a problem, said board president Anthony Scalici. “When you deal with one kid’s word against another … that’s just ugly stuff. This puts the grand mediator in there.”
The use of CCTV has proved both useful and problematic in the United Kingdom, the West’s most developed sphere of public surveillance. Video records can be helpful in identifying unknown assailants or vandals.
“It’s not the ‘Big Brother is watching you’ thing, it’s really about watching other people who come into the school,” said high school principal Gary Kuch.
The report goes on to say that:
Cameras have been on school buses for a number of years and will continue to be allowed under the new policy, which replaces a policy solely covering bus surveillance.
One must remember that the main reason cameras are on buses is because the bus driver necessarily faces away from dozens of students for the bulk of their job. This isn’t the case during the school day when all students are assigned supervision, even during lunch and study periods.
The most puzzling section of the report comes from Principal Gary Kuch:
He [Kuch] elaborated by saying that, while the cameras will serve as a deterrent to misbehavior by students, they are being put in place in part to monitor the school grounds for vandalism from tourists and other non-students who use the facility.
If students aren’t the target, there’s no reason CCTV should be used indoors during the day. Turn it on from 3pm - 7am, turn it on outside, turn it on during the summers and vacation periods. If there have been problems with the behavior of visitors, what policies have been implemented to address those problems before resorting to CCTV?
He [Kuch] said the footage would only be held for a few days before being deleted.
Footage must be kept for more than a few days to be used effectively. A simple Google search [view search results here] shows how videos often make their way to sites like Youtube before gaining the attention of parents, school administrators or police. It is naive to think that all non-vandal offenses such as physical abuse will be captured, reported and investigated within 72 hours - this is CCS, not CSI. [nota bene: this report shows 200 instances of abusive behavior over two months]. Archiving the footage on re-writeable Blu-Ray or writeable DVD media would cost just a few dollars a day.
The Board should have prepared and distributed a cost-benefit analysis of this project that includes the following:
- Total expenses. Cameras and installation, storage/media [and necessary hardware], planned and unplanned maintenance, signage and public notification costs, training sessions for users, cost of staff time to maintain storage of footage, etc.Projected costs of annual vandalism. How many instances of vandalism occur? What is the total dollar value of incidents annually over the last 10 years? Based on the data, observations and the trends exposed by both, what issues are likely to come up?
Student behavior data. The district should have compiled data of disciplinary behavior that can predict (in a general sense) what happens, where it happens and when it happens. Analyzing this data can tell the Board very quickly whether CCTV will address problems effectively.
Is this information available on the District’s website? Was it given out at School Board meetings and made available for pickup to those who couldn’t attend? If anyone has a copy, let me know - I’ll scan and post it here.
UPDATE at 3/20/07, 4.53pm:
A reader e-mailed the Board’s policy on the use of cameras. It is available for download in MS Word and Adobe Acrobat formats. Click the following to view the files or right-click and ‘save as’ to save them.
ccs_camera_policy.doc [MS Word Document, 980kb, opens in a new window]
ccs_camera_policy.pdf [Adobe Acrobat, 566kb, opens in a new window]
The policy is less than comprehensive.
