Again, Lies and Wasted Money

The bigger the lie, the more people might actually believe it:

• Ninety cameras will be installed outside Fenger and 39 other Chicago Public high schools to stop what Mayor Daley called the ugly “epidemic of children killing children,” thanks to a $2.25 million gift from the banking giant that employs the mayor’s brother.

  Last year, a bloody weekend for CPS students prompted Daley to link 4,844 cameras inside schools and 1,437 exterior school cameras to police districts, squad cars and the 911 center. Until that time, real-time video from school cameras was accessible only to school security.

  Thanks to J.P. Morgan Chase, where William Daley serves as Midwest chairman, 40 more high schools will get exterior cameras. They include Fenger, where 16-year-old Derrion Albert was beaten to death in September during a brawl captured on videotape and played around the world.

Available in squad cars? Really? We'd love to see that. Actually, we wouldn't, because that would mean more police tied-up to a bullshit system that hasn't done one single thing to stop a beating, a shooting or a killing.

The only proven strategy that prevents crime time and time again is eyes on the street and boots on the ground. Look at those camera totals - 4,844 inside cameras and 1,437 outside cameras. 6,281 cameras.

Over SIXTY-TWO HUNDRED cameras just on high schools. And how many people hired to watch them? We're going to take a wild guess here and say under 20. A dozen or twenty coppers taken off the streets, maybe a few clout-heavy retirees hired to watch some screens, but in reality no one is watching these things. They can't. The cost of hiring enough eyeballs would deplete the entire Department budget in a year.

Think of the floor space needed for something like this. Think of the computers and video monitors. Think of the electronic storage you have to have on hand for an operation of this size - we're not talking megabytes or gigabytes - but multiple terabytes of information just for storage purposes.

And get this...

• Schools CEO Ron Huberman stressed that some of the new cameras would be “outside the immediate envelope” of the school because that’s where the violence takes place.

  Daley stressed that none of the new cameras would have blue strobe lights that carry the stigma of a high-crime area.

  “You won’t even see this unless you’re looking for it,” he said.

"The Hube" states the obvious - most of this doesn't happen on school grounds. Even the Fenger incident took place blocks away and wouldn't have been prevented even if a hundred cameras were around. And no "blue light" strobes? The deterrent value of these cameras is nil. The only purpose they serve is to record a crime as it happens - and that's a longshot seeing as how the cameras are always pointed the wrong way or non-functional half the time.

How about we hire a shitload of cops and re-start the School Unit?