Another misleading newspaper article…
The older I get, the more cynical I am about newspaper coverage. (After being misquoted and seeing what passes as “balanced reporting,” I consider it a learned response.) Today’s Boston Globe ran a story about surveillance of public places that erroneously claims: “Police in Lowell are installing sophisticated video surveillance systems to watch students inside and outside the public schools as part of a citywide security system to monitor and deter criminal activity.”
I don’t pretend to speak for the Lowell police here, and in fact, I know little about the city’s plans for cameras except what I’ve heard about prioritizing “hot spots” of criminal activity and having live feeds to the police station. But I do know about security cameras in the schools, and I can tell you we have had them at the high school for years, and there is no plan to expand the system or go to a live feed with the police. At LHS, more than 100 cameras transmit internally to a video control center at the school, which is monitored by a security officer. The cameras view hallways, stairwells, doors, and outside areas, and have been extremely effective in deterring crime and catching perpetrators. For instance, although they are not in the bathrooms or locker rooms, they are installed directly outside those areas, which enabled high school security to identify the student who set fire to a trashcan in the boys’ bathroom a few years ago. The cameras enhance security (consider 3,800 students with only a handful of security and police officers), and they serve as a major crime deterrent. Today’s paper attempts to make this about civil liberties and some may see it that way; but the internal video surveillance system at Lowell High School serves a critical role in student safety, and I’ve got no problem with that. The fact that the paper got the story so blatantly wrong about the city’s plans baffles even the most cynical reader.