Q&A of the Day – Should Florida add Classroom Cameras?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: The public wanted the right to monitor police activity with body cameras. I think the public should have the right to have cameras in the classroom to monitor teacher activity. Cameras would allow parents to monitor classroom activity.
Every family should have the right to send their child to school and not have their child be indoctrinated with someone's personal political agenda. That seems like a basic right and expectation.
Bottom Line: And to your point isn’t that really how the current educational movement by concerned parents took hold? It was the forced remote learning during the peak of the pandemic lockdowns which opened the eyes of parents like had never been done before. Once parents were seeing and hearing what was really taking place with their children’s education, many became horrified by the wokeness and indoctrination that they witnessed. That’s what gave rise to groups like Florida-based Moms for Liberty and related organizations across the country which helped to organize concerned parents at school board meetings and importantly recruit and train school board candidates to help flip school boards across our state and the country over the past couple of years. I seriously doubt a reform movement would have successfully been established had it not been for the ability of parents to witness the realities of what public education had become firsthand. So, regarding your comparison and point regarding police body cams...
There’s no doubt there’s been a change in police behavior as a result of police body cameras. Many organizations have studied this, though the largest accredited study has been conducted by the National Insitute of Justice. The NIJ study covered the behavioral changes of nearly 12,000 law enforcement professionals over the course of eight years evaluating 30 accredited studies in the process. The results...
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact on officers’ use of force.
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact upon assaults on officers, officer injuries, and resistance to officers.
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact on arrests.
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact on general measures of officer-initiated calls for service or proactivity.
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact on traffic stops or tickets
- The use of body-worn cameras by police officers did not have a statistically significant impact on stop-and-frisk stops
So where was there a measured difference?
- Agencies that acquired cameras had statistically significant decreases in fatal police–citizen encounters after three years, compared with agencies that did not acquire cameras.
- Deploying body-worn cameras resulted in a statistically significant reduction in citizen injury.
- A statistically significant reduction in police use-of-force but no significant difference in citizen complaints.
Those results are profound. The net of it is this. Police body cams haven’t changed the way the public uses or interacts with law enforcement (for better or for worse), It also hasn’t changed the way law enforcement professionals carry out their job and respond to needs and threats in the community. What it has done is to help reign in the extremes in responses. It’s shown that when physical altercations have occurred with law enforcement professionals, those who may have been prone to a more extreme response have been less likely to take it as far as they once might have. So, let’s take this full circle...
If the net effect of adding police body cams hasn’t impacted the use of law enforcement or law enforcement’s behavior except with the outliers who were prone towards more aggressive/perhaps extreme behavior, isn’t the most likely outcome with cameras in schools a similar one? In which teachers nor students would generally be impacted by the cameras being there, but that perhaps those teachers prone towards pushing agendas/extremes in the classroom would be more reluctant to go there? I’m with you. Classroom cameras should be the norm in my view and your law enforcement analogy is a perfect example of why.