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Video Camera Live Feed to Police Headquarters

By Justin Bathon

The top story on the  Drudge Report yesterday was about a school in New Jersey that is sending live feeds from their 20 school cameras directly to the police. The Drudge Report is a conservative leaning news source, so it ran the story to decry the lack of privacy in the modern world.

The Video from WCBS, New York.

This represents the next step in school video surveillance. While I too am concerned about the lack of privacy, with the cameras only in public areas and given the current state of the law regarding privacy in schools, I see nothing clearly illegal under current law about this activity.

What I am concerned more about (although this story does concern me) is the increasing relationship between schools and the police. In cases such as this, it is almost as if the police are the school's private security firm. Because of the differences in the law regarding how police treat the public and how school authorities treat school children, mingling the two authorities in schools can be problematic. Police are trained for a different purpose than school authorities are trained and their responses to school disciplinary incidents are naturally going to be different. There is a certain degree of administrative discretion in school authorities (who are always former teachers) that police are not trained or qualified to enforce.

Full post as published by Edjurist on November 13, 2007 (boomark / email).