The Chesterfield County VA Board of supervisors is currently debating what to do with a windfall of about 17 million dollars. One proposed action is to add cameras to middle and elementary schools. The argument is that these cameras will protect students and faculty from false accusation.
However, False accusations are only ONE way in which injustice can be committed against a population.
Chesterfield has a history of being a pump-house for the school to prison pipeline. Admin officials and SROs seem all too eager to turn discipline issues into legal issues.
Cameras don’t solve this.
Overzealous prosecution is not an issue of whether or not something happened. It is a question of "do we make it a criminal matter?"
Once that decision is made, a student is charged...
Charged.. they are more than likely to accept a plea bargain than go to trial. Our system is designed this way. The plea-process has incentivized a system where the innocent will plead guilty to crimes they did not commit rather than face draconian punishments and “roll dice” on a jury.
A child and their family facing this and the prospect of a lost future over what would have been considered childish shenanigans 40 years ago is literally being sand-blasted by the system.
Even if they go to trial, the video will likely NOT Clear them because the systematic failure is that the student was charged in the first place! Not if something has happened.
Last year, the School Resource Officer at L.C. Bird High School was outed as a White supremacist. He was very obvious in social media, and diligent Antifa watchdogs alerted authorities. How many more are flying under the radar?
Too often the issue is selective enforcement, not falsified evidence. Mass surveillance would just make it
easier for bad actors to "pick and choose" who to charge
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