Gregory Floyd, director of the Citywide Division, told City Council members Sept. 24 that Local 237 has long sought to have cameras installed in schools as a way to improve protection for students, faculty and visitors.

Floyd testified at a Council hearing on a bill proposed by Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr, Intro.490, which would require the city to install security cameras in all city schools. President Carl Haynes was unable to testify himself because he had to attend a meeting of the Central Labor Council.

“Teamsters Local 237 has for a long time maintained that the NYPD School Safety Division and the Department of Education cannot win the war against crime in the schools without first securing all the exits and entrances in each school,” Floyd told the lawmakers.

He pointed out that the Local has often called on the city and education officials to find the means to upgrade antiquated scanning equipment and install surveillance cameras and magnetic doors at every entryway or exit door in the city’s schools.

Floyd noted that an average-sized school has eight to 12 doors and that some of the larger schools have as many as 20 entrances and exits.

School safety agents routinely patrol inside the schools and their perimeters, but can’t guard every door, the union official said. He pointed out that because of the large number of doors to be watched, it would not make sense to permanently station a safety agent at every door in every school.

He reiterated the Local’s contention that cameras and magnetic doors should be installed to protect the school population, particularly in the most troublesome public schools. The union believes that “Ideally, security cameras should be used in all schools as required in Intro 490,” Floyd said.

“In addition, the city and the Department of Education should seriously consider installing cameras to monitor the stairwells in troublesome schools,” he told the Council members. “These stairwells are often poorly lit and are not centrally located.”

He said that there have been rapes committed in the stairwells and that safety agents had frequently apprehended students engaged in sexual activity in those areas. “This may not happen if surveillance cameras are installed in these dark recesses,” he asserted.

Teachers’ President Agrees
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, also testified in favor of installation of video cameras. “We think the installation . . . in schools where incident data support the use of such surveillance is an excellent idea,” she said.

She argued, however, that the Education Department has not presented any incident data to the UFT for the past year.

She noted that although the cost of such equipment has gone down in past years, it is still expensive. “In our view,” she added, “the installation of cameras in every school in the city, regardless of whether incident data merit it, is not the best way to use scarce taxpayer dollars.”

The UFT official said her organization believed it would be wiser and more cost effective to use some of the funding to ensure that school safety agent staffing is maintained at sufficient coverage levels.

She noted, as has President Haynes in the past, that while school safety agents are still being hired and trained, their numbers are insufficient to fill the void when 30 trained and experienced agents leave the job every month.

From the NYPD
Testifying for the NYPD, Assistant Chief Gerald Nelson, commanding officer of the School Safety Division, conceded that video surveillance can augment traditional crime fighting techniques, be a powerful and identification tool, and serve as a useful deterrent.

He added, however, that closed circuit television “is expensive to purchase, time consuming to install and labor intensive to monitor.” He said that it could cost as much as $200,000 to wire a large school for camera surveillance.

Benjamin J. Tucker, chief executive of the Office of School Safety and Planning for the Education Department, told Council members his department had practical and legal reasons with respect to parts of the proposed legislation. He said it would authorize only the NYPD to set up the rules and regulations regarding access to the video logs. He asserted that this runs counter to the agreement made between the two agencies when School Safety was merged with the NYPD.