As a parent, I would like more cameras in schools, since students’ abuse gets ignored, and the person fighting back gets more punishment than the instigator.
As a former student/child, who fortunately has grown up in a place where none of the ridiculous restrictions typical for US schools existed, I find extremely sad that there are such places on Earth where the management of a school has decreed that the student was guilty even without possessing any weapon because "was holding his musical instrument like a rifle".
If not even the children can play any more however they want, for fear that automated surveillance would identify them as "pretending to have a weapon", which can result in punishment, I believe that such a society has serious problems for which it certainly did not find the right solution. I would not want for myself or for my children to live in such a place.
As someone who read the actual article, nowhere did it say that the student was decreed guilty. In fact, the police explicitly said "no further action was needed." Unclutch your pearls.
I believe that you have not read carefully either the article or my posting.
I have not said anything about the police.
I have quoted directly from the article exactly what the school management said.
It is the school management who has said that the guilty party in this incident is neither the school nor the surveillance equipment, but the student who "was holding his musical instrument like a rifle". (This does not even take into consideration that there may be legitimate reasons for holding a musical instrument like a rifle, e.g. for checking it for defects or dirt.)
It is also the school management who implied that they will reprimand any student for "pretending to have a weapon".
I do not know how you played as a child, but "pretending to have a weapon" is certainly an exceedingly common behavior, perhaps more so in countries where people would never think about using true weapons.
By removing the defense of plausible deniability for administrators, just like bodycams do for cops and dash cams do for bad drivers.
It should be legally required for daycares to have cameras. Those kids cannot communicate, so there is zero accountability there. And this only becomes a thing because it’s so incredibly cheap to add the accountability.
Obviously, in before times, when it was too expensive, a cost benefit decision has to be made to go with trust only. But now that the cost is trivial, that cost benefit decision has to be revisited.
The post you are responding to is about punishing the victim because teachers are too lazy/cowards to punish the culprits. Cams incentivize them to do the right thing.
Even if the situations are noticed and seen fully, does it cause the schools to not punish the victim? The stories I've heard about zero tolerance policies were that _even when the situation was fully obvious_, victims got punished because they took part in an altercation.
The video evidence is just one piece of the puzzle that is needed to help administrators properly adjudicate conflicts, and to help the public hold the administrators accountable.
If the rot is so deep that even who was right and who was wrong does not matter, then that is a separate issue that members of the public need to sort out with each other.
