ARIZONA - A north-central Phoenix school is the first in the nation to 
install cameras designed to detect the faces of sex offenders or missing 
children and instantly alert police.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office used a grant to install equipment 
in the entrance and attendance office at Royal Palm Middle School. The 
cameras are expected to be operating next week.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the cameras cost about $3,000 to $5,000 for a 
school to install and will not violate the privacy of anyone not already 
in the Arizona sex offender or in the national missing children 
databases, including possible abductors of missing children. If the 
camera registers a possible hit, the Sheriff's Office is quietly alerted 
and will send a deputy or police officer to investigate. 

Arpaio said the Royal Palm system is not set to recognize people wanted 
for other crimes. School districts are not interested in becoming law 
enforcement agencies, he said. 

(Doesn't looking for missing children and harassing sex offenders 
constitute "law enforcement"? I'm not familiar with Arizona law, but 
are all sex offenders banned from going near schools, even if the sex 
offender is a parent or relative of a child there? Not all sex 
offenders abused children. But why stop at sex offenders? I don't want 
thieves in schools, either. Or murderers. I'm not overly fond of 
vandals, come to think of it. Where do you draw the line? If someone 
has paid their debt by serving time, leave them the fuck alone or pass 
new sentencing guidelines.)

"The main issue is to take care of kids," Arpaio said. "We're not going 
to go after people who have warrants." 

The system scans 28 facial features and matches them against logged 
images in the databases. School personnel will not know about the alert, 
and images that do not match the databases are erased, with no permanent 
recording.

Mary Lou Micheaels is a mother of three and a member of the Washington 
District School Board. She's heard no complaints from parents. 

"I wanted to make sure it was a system that protected our children and 
protected people's privacy," Micheaels said. "If one child isn't 
abducted, or one is found, it's worth it."

(Has the Royal Palm Middle School in Arizona had a rash of stranger 
abductions? Is it ground zero for perverts?)

Principal Mike Christensen carries around the responsibility for the 
safety of Royal Palm's 1,180 seventh- and eighth-graders. Christensen 
said he volunteered to test the new equipment, even though the campus 
has reported no problems. 

"I do not think we can do too much," Christensen said. "When kids walk 
on campus, the expectation is they need to be safe." 

(I walked to school in first grade. Crossing four-lane highways. 
Avoiding contact with strangers. Running away from retards that had 
escaped from the group home. Passing by a housing project. Nothing bad 
ever happened. Nothing bad happened to anyone. At least in the context 
of walking to school and milling about campus. 

If a six-year-old can avoid being abducted and molested, particularly at 
a time when ritual sexual abuse in Satan's name was rampant, I suspect 
the average 7th or 8th grader can do the same. And if something bad 
does happen, it's an anomaly and should be treated as such.)

Royal Palm mother Teresa Johnson said she supports the idea and would 
like to see the campus install a third biometric camera in the parking 
lot, a more likely place to find sex offenders lurking. 

(Oh, those lurking sex offenders, hiding behind every corner, just 
itching to get their hands on your kids. Maybe we could install secure, 
sterile habitrails from children's homes to schools, as to eliminate 
stranger danger and pesky germs.)

The chances of catching a molester or finding a missing child on this 
campus are remote, Arpaio said, but this is an experiment that could 
begin to make a difference in a growing problem. Arpaio said he's ready 
to help other districts install the equipment. 

(What growing problem? Have the hormones in our meat supply turned that 
many Americans into rapists and molesters?)

Source: Arizona Republic