I remembered talking to my CF a little while back about a case where there was a sexual assault that was stopped in Swig with the help of cameras. Here's how it happened:
A girl who had been with a new guy friend that she met one night out partying had suddenly disappeared. Her friends felt that something wasn't right, called up campus safety, who for some reason started to get worried. Campus Safety ended up getting involved, and for some reason, started to move around the camera on the side of Kennedy, until they zoomed in on a room where they could very easily see a physical altercation going on. Fortunately campus safety was able to get to the girl without anything really bad happening. While some of the starting details may be a little bit shaky, from the two people that I interviewed, the second half of the story seems to be right. I'm not really sure what lead up to the decision to start looking into rooms with a camera, but it seems to have worked really well.
I went to the Kennedy Commons, and I looked around outside for this fabled camera, and was quickly able to find it, sitting on the top corner of the patio:
If it was able to be moved around, and zoomed in far enough to look into someone's room, I have to imagine that there are a lot of ways that this particular camera could be easily abused. However, as I think it would be very difficult to go about proving it, I am going to have to stick to speculation on the subject. Assuming that Campus Safety isn't going to be browsing through your rooms on a regular basis, I think that this camera probably has a good purpose. There are lots of bikes that are locked up outside of Swig, and I have to imagine that just once in a while bikes are taken without permission, and the camera is there to deter that theft/possibly identify the thieves. Lets just hope that that is all that they are doing.
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