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School Safety/Jail Time
Vera12
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey Guys,
This is my first thread so if I'm doing this wrong please don't take offense and any help would be appreciated. So my friend had this idea about testing school safety. We wonder what would happen if we entered the school with a video camera and documented how easily we got in undetected and (This is gonna sound bad.) how many people could have been harm if we intended violence. We're not, but we're trying to raise awareness of school safety and the lack thereof. We want to do this but are afraid of the legal ramifications. Also, I am afraid of getting shot. My friend thinks the police are unlikely to open fire, but I disagree. If anyone could help us understand how we should go about this and what could happen to us if we proceed. I would greatly appreciate it. We wouldn't be doing anything bad, at worst just handing cards to teachers who opened classroom doors to us and tallying them at the end of the experiment to determine the danger the students and faculty would have been in. However, I could see this horribly and would despreately like some help.
Thanks
This is my first thread so if I'm doing this wrong please don't take offense and any help would be appreciated. So my friend had this idea about testing school safety. We wonder what would happen if we entered the school with a video camera and documented how easily we got in undetected and (This is gonna sound bad.) how many people could have been harm if we intended violence. We're not, but we're trying to raise awareness of school safety and the lack thereof. We want to do this but are afraid of the legal ramifications. Also, I am afraid of getting shot. My friend thinks the police are unlikely to open fire, but I disagree. If anyone could help us understand how we should go about this and what could happen to us if we proceed. I would greatly appreciate it. We wouldn't be doing anything bad, at worst just handing cards to teachers who opened classroom doors to us and tallying them at the end of the experiment to determine the danger the students and faculty would have been in. However, I could see this horribly and would despreately like some help.
Thanks
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So my advice is to leave this as an idea and nothing more.
Oh, and unless you plan on dealing out mass violence in secret, handing out little cards that represent "gotchya!" is not an apt comparison.
On that note, you would be trespassing with a video camera. No matter what your intentions were, that is the very best case scenario. Maybe things would escalate to assault against a faculty member or another student? Maybe things would escalate to destruction of property (yours or the schools) and maybe you would be arrested.
Don't do this.
I agree, in many situations you would be lucky if you didn't end up in a hospital. Highschools tend to be VERY paranoid about this sort of thing.
Second, this is not a good idea because high school kids don't give a shit. I should know, I'm a senior.
And closing, you haven't even talked and discussed this with your principal. He would reject it anyways due to the first reason why. Not only that but if you subject twords any sort of violence or to even act it out, those kids can shrug it off like its alright, tell their parents and get your district sued.
I know you want to help, but you can't. Just make some posters or something.
I am going to say this again. THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. If you were to pull out a gun, even a fake one, the police WILL shoot you. It's like a terrorize threat and they can claim amnesty.
What is your objective?
Schools, like any area (ie compound) that isn't heavily locked down has major security flaws. Hell, Columbine was done by students WITH LOUD WEAPONS, how would some non-students with no weapons serve to prove anything? it just doesn't make any sense.
Why do you want to show that schools are unsafe? Why is it important? Did you feel unsafe at school? Did you feel more unsafe there than elsewhere? Do you know what the faculty is supposed to do in case of emergencies?
They have discussions about this stuff in her classes and the stories she hears about things which go on even in the best schools give her cause to worry. The schools near where we live are definitely not the best, not urban but not well-funded either, and present more safety concerns. Posters would probably be a better idea, but probably wouldn't have much impact. Thanks for all the advice.
What happens when recent high school graduates walk into a school with a video camera? They are very quickly asked to leave, and the cops are called if they don't. Some schools also have liaison officers, so it could very well be a cop asking you to leave the first time.
School safety (or possible lack thereof) is not a new issue. It's not even really news to simply say that some schools aren't as safe as they should be. Even if you went through with this, you aren't revealing some ground breaking truth. There would likely be no positive change as a result of your stunt.
If your friend is really concerned, why not contact the school board and voice these concerns? Find out the board policy is for this particular high school when it comes to security, and point out any areas where they may be too lax.
As someone who is on the path to being a teacher himself, this would be a great way to ensure that no school district will hire her ever.
Why can't people just stop being smug self righteous asses and say: "This is a bad idea because x,y,z"
1. You will be putting yourselves at great risk with little chance for meaningful benefit.
2. Without knowledge of how investigative journalism works, it's very unlikely that you would produce anything that's fair or balanced (not in the Fox sense). It seems that you are going in with an agenda, which tends to lead people to ignore facts which contradict their ideas.
3. You will be unnecessarily disrupting the teachers and students.
4. There are better ways to get your point across (school board or PTA meetings, discussions with the principal or superintendent).
5. Anytime the phrase "police are unlikely to open fire" comes up, that's a real good sign that you're doing something wrong.
At the very least, before you try something like this, you need to contact the principal, the superintendent, and the police and get permission from all of them, which is highly unlikely. There are also the privacy issues mentioned earlier (videotaping random people, many minors, is bad news legally). Unless you could get some sort of release waiver, and get every single person to sign it, you'd be in murky legal water.
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Additionally, cops are likely to respond to reports that people are wandering around the school with a video camera in the mindset that they may be responding to the scene of a shooting in progress, which just increases the likelihood that someone is going to get hurt.
I actually knew some people in high school who pulled exactly this trick. They were a couple years ahead of me.
My high school used motion sensors for security, and they figured out somehow what the range on them was. They walked it all out and figured you could walk through the school without setting the alarm off. They made a pretty neat video; there's four of them that walk a really specific path around the inside of the school. It's actually sort of cool... until the sensor that they missed.
The last fifteen minutes of the video are just the cameraman's feet as they all run away. The whole thing ended with minor trespassing charges, and a couple of them got scholarships yanked.
ed: oh, I see it's during the day. Is it that fucking hard to get a video camera into a high school anyway? At worst you'll get hit with trespass or maybe mischief. It's also possible that your state has laws against recording people without their consent. You're not going to get shot at, but this is still a retarded idea.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It's a school, not a prison. Of course you can access it during the day, during school hours. The vast majority of schools do not have metal detectors or guards at every entrance. Most high schools are going to have a single resource officer and a handful of campus security personnel armed with walkie talkies.
They are not going to go code red and call the SWAT team because of a couple of kids with a camera. You will probably be escorted with a firm glare off campus.
My buddy and I tried this our senior year, which was after Columbine. We visited our rival school just to see what it was like. We walked around and just kind of watched things, but were caught within about ten minutes and asked to leave. Actually, I was impressed that the security guy recognized us immediately as being "strangers."
I'm not saying you should do it, but you're not going to be shot at or arrested. Hell, I'm a teacher at a small charter school and if I saw a few kids walking around with a video camera, I'd probably assume you were doing a film project and volunteer for an interview. Not all schools are on high alert.
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well clearly you're not on Code Red Alert Watch Status 24/7, your school is unsafe and ripe for the plucking, children need to be sheltered and kept under lock/key/bars/armed guard, this is going on YouTube abloo bloo get some Mall Ninjas to protect you.
</blatant sarcasm>
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My great uncle did something similiar in between WWII-Korea. He was sent around as a Captain (Air Force, he was an NCO) with little green stickers. Anywhere he got where he shouldn't have been able to, he put a sticker. He had to come back to the General who dreamt this thing up for more stickers.
Anyway, just coordinate coordinate coordinate. And keep records of coordination. This could be a really cool thing, and if I lived by MY high school I'd be interested in trying this myself. That place definitely wasn't secure.
Seriously, without any cooperation and planning with your local school board, you are setting yourself up for some legal problems.
They wouldn't take some random people off the street and say, "Okay, come in and see just how far you can get without being caught!"
You're not some sort of security expert, you don't have any credentials to gauge the safety of the school. Furthermore, if you get hurt, or if someone else somehow gets hurt, there's liability issues out the ass.
Chris Hansen would never ask permission! Where's the journalistic integrity in that?
http://www.every10mins.com/video/1752_raw_footage_of_the_reporter_being_arrested.html
I should add that as a photographer I have seen others getting arrested and you usally don't get so many warning as this report did.
One warning is all you can hope for in dealing with the police. don't obey and you'll get cuffed in most cases.
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I mean, my god, it's a school, not a prison. I mean, really, are they supposed to be locked down with high fences, razor wire, and guard dogs? Maybe a couple of towers with snipers in them? "Papers please" every time someone wants to walk into a room?
Life is full of risk. Kids are safer at school than pretty much anywhere else on the planet, and that's without turning the school into a police state. If nothing else, all this will do is freak a bunch of parents out, and make them teach their kids the lesson that it's worth giving up any amount of freedom for the tiniest possible increase in their security.