PRETTY SOON THERE'LL BE SPYCAMS EVERYWHERE

Smile You Teenage Drug Dealer, You, You're On Candid Camera!

Spycams will soon become widespread throughout Central Okanagan schools,
and the hope is they'll lead to the apprehension of drug dealers, vandals,
bullies and thieves.

The way was cleared for the installation of surveillance cameras at this
week's school board meeting, where trustees almost reluctantly approved a
policy permitting their use.

Actually, trustees were playing a bit of catch-up, since some schools have
already experimented with spycams. Police, politicians and principals who
advocate their use prefer the term community safety cameras, but that's a
mouthful as well as a bit of propaganda, so we'll stick to calling a spycam
a spycam.

Besides, surreptitious surveillance is the whole point of these cameras.
They are designed to catch people doing what they shouldn't be doing - and
advocates say they do that job wonderfully.

"The cameras enhanced safety at the school, there's no question," Norm
Bradley, former principal of George Elliot Secondary School in Winfield,
told trustees earlier this week.

"We solved crimes of vandalism and theft using the video cameras."

Schools across North America are practically in a frenzy to install
spycams, local superintendent Ron Rubadeau says. At one educational
conference, he said, the principal of a school with 1,500 students boasted
that the building had 445 spycams.

He was boasting about that number because, increasingly, American parents
are deciding where to send their kids based on how many spycams are in a
school.

It takes a contrarian to note that Columbine High School had plenty of
spycams, which were absolutely of no use whatsoever in preventing a couple
of teenaged gunmen from stalking through the campus and murdering their
classmates. But, videotape from the Columbine spycams did provide a few
creepy, voyeuristic thrills when excerpts from it were made public.

Nevertheless, the prevailing belief among U.S. school administrators is
that they have a legal requirement to make schools safe through the
installation of spycams, so it's only a matter of time before the same view
becomes widespread in Canada.

At this week's school board meeting, several trustees expressed ambivalence
toward the use of spycams. "In a perfect world, we wouldn't have any
surveillance cameras," Moyra Baxter said. "I think video cameras give a
false sense of security. To think they could prevent a horrendous act is
wrong."

Board chairman Eric Buckley was concerned that the proposed policy
governing spycams did not explicitly describe the circumstances under which
they could be installed.

"The criteria by which the video cameras would be used is the most critical
element of this debate," Buckley said. "Until those questions are
addressed, I'm not prepared to discuss this policy further. And I'd even
say we should take out the cameras that are already in use until we get
this issue resolved."

But the other trustees agreed with a suggestion from administration that
individual school principals are best suited to make judgments about
whether spycams are needed, how many should be put into use and where.

"The people who work on the sites will determine where the cameras need to
go," said trustee Don Ennis, a former principal of KSS.

The policy as approved by trustees - with Buckley casting the lone
dissenting vote - does provide some regulation concerning the location and
use of spycams.

Some of the rules: cameras can be installed everywhere and anywhere,
including washrooms; cameras can be hidden; tapes may be used on Crime
Stoppers.

It may come as a surprise to those who advocate the use of spycams to know
that no one will actually be watching the monitors. At least, not on a
regular, on-going basis.

The monitors will probably be placed in the school's office, but officials
say they can't afford to pay anyone to sit there, full-time, watching
what's on the screens. The tapes are really only for playback use, to aid
in the after-the-fact investigation of crimes, fights and acts of vandalism.

If any drug-dealing, window-breaking, computer-stealing teenage thug is
stupid enough to do their dirty deeds in full view of a spycam, they'll be
nabbed pronto.

But what the tapes will mostly show is kids talking, walking and studying.
They'll show our schools are safe, but we'll go right on thinking that they
aren't. And, believing that, we'll keep putting up spycams to film phantoms.