Officials at the Lockport, New York, school district have purchased face recognition technology as part of a purported effort to prevent school shootings. Starting in September, all 10 of Lockport District’s school buildings, just north of Buffalo, will be outfitted with a surveillance system that can identify faces and objects. The software, known as Aegis, was developed by SN Technologies Corp., a Canadian biometrics firm that specifically advertises to schools. It can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school’s “blacklist” enters the premises. Aegis also sends alerts any time one of the “top 10” most popular guns used in school shootings appears in view of a camera. The district is spending most of its recent $4 million state “Smart School” grant on these and other enhancements to its security systems, including bullet-proof greeter windows and a mass notification system, according to the Niagra Gazette. “We always have to be on our guard. We can’t let our guard down,” Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley told the Buffalo News. “For the Board of Education and the Lockport City School District, this is the No. 1 priority: school security.”

Yet given the nature of gun violence at schools, Lockport’s purchase of surveillance technology appears inefficient and expensive. All of the major school shootings in the last five years in the U.S. have been carried out by current students or alumnae of the school in question. “These are students for whom the school wouldn’t have a reason to have their face entered into the face recognition system’s blacklist,” explained Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a security and policing expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. The object recognition system seems similarly pointless, she said. Most shooters don’t brandish their guns before opening fire; and by the time they do, an object-detection algorithm that could specify the exact type of weapon they’re firing would not be of much use. As Jim Shultz, a Lockport parent, pointed out to the Buffalo News, the technology would give a school, at best, only a few extra seconds in response time to a shooting. What’s more, most shootings typically end within seconds — so that face or weapon recognition would provide about as much real-time value as a 911 call. Lockport schools, Shultz added, have already instituted preventative — albeit less flashy — measures, such as keeping doors locked and requiring visitors to check in. Because face recognition appears uniquely ill-suited to respond directly to school shootings — which are themselves statistically rare events — privacy experts fear that the primary function of the technology will be to expand the surveillance and criminalization of adolescents. “Whether it was intended to be this way or not, Lockport’s technology is effectively going to be a surveillance system and not a safety system,” Levinson-Waldman said. Learning While Black Lockport’s system will store data for up to 60 days. Students will not be automatically entered into its database, but administrators will be able to use the system to “follow” those who commit infractions. “If we had a student who committed some type of offense against the code of conduct, we can follow that student throughout the day to see maybe who they interacted with,” one school official said. Levinson-Waldman says that such surveillance powers are likely to be wielded disproportionately against students of color, who already face disciplinary bias at school. Several studies have shown that black and Latino children are routinely viewed as more dangerous than their white peers, regardless of their behavior. Black students are not more likely to misbehave than white students, yet they are more likely to be suspended, receive corporal punishment, or have a school-related arrest, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in April. “This is going to exacerbate the racial disparities you already see, whether it’s about monitoring or enforcement,” said John Cusick, a fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Students who are already subject to police surveillance in their neighborhoods, he added, will now have to face the same environment at their school. Research by the NAACP LDF and others suggests that putting police officers in schools increases the number of students who end up incarcerated for harmless incidents. “Face recognition might curtail how students interact. They might be afraid of being linked to other students or engaging in adolescent behavior,” Cusick continued. “It has the ability to criminalize friendships.” Civil rights attorneys raised questions about whether biometric data collected at schools like Lockport might fuel not only the school-to-prison pipeline, but also deportations. Schools might share their biometric data with law enforcement and, in turn, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — or vice versa. In California and New Jersey, ICE has arrested undocumented parents as they dropped their kids off at school, and ICE was recently granted access to at least one automatic license plate reader database. Levinson-Waldman wonders which faces will be put into the system to flag a response and whether schools will connect to a law enforcement database. “Will they give ICE information about that parent’s movements, intentionally or not?” she asked.

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