The False Allure of Security Technologies

THE SECURITY INDUSTRY TRADE MAGAZINE, AMERICAN SCHOOLAND UNIVERSITY, BEGAN an article about school safety with the following real-life scenario (Kennedy, 2001): As students were enjoying recess on the playground in the Plano Independent School District, Texas, a suspicious man sitting in a parked Cadillac tried to lure some of the children over to the car. When the teacher on duty saw what was happening and began to approach the car, the man drove off. That might have been the end of the incident, except that the teacher was carrying a two-way radio. She called back to the school office, and someone immediately called 911. A few minutes later, the man was in custody. "He was caught before he got out of the neighborhood," says Ken Bangs, director of police, security, and student safety for the Piano district. "Did we dodge a bullet? I believe that we did." For Bangs, it was more proof that the district's increasing use of radios was paying dividends in safer campuses, and more secure students and staff. "Having these radios makes a ton of difference," says Bangs. Like many articles that appear in American School and University, Security Technology and Design, Security Management, and other trade magazines of the security industry, the use of technology is described as a boon for school safety, and the newest advances and improvements in technology are regularly featured in articles and represented in advertisements that appear in the magazines. In addition to radios, these technologies include metal detectors, scanners, close-circuit televisions (CCTVs), iris recognition systems, and other forms of surveillance, detection, access control, and biometric equipment. Many of these items depend on technologies (such as digitalized networks and lasers) that were developed by military and security industry scientists beginning in the 1940s primarily for police and national security purposes during the Cold War. Today, the prevalence in high schools of what Devine (1996) called "techno-security" is an example of how these developments in technology have altered our public spaces, institutions, and homes. In the case of schools, the use of techno-security epitomizes fear of violence as well as fear of legal liability that convinces school district administrators that security technology is worth the expenditures. However, it also epitomizes the inroads that security businesses have made in the public school market. Peter Blouvelt, the executive director of the National Alliance for Sate Schools, remarked about security vendors: "Schools have become a major market for these guys. The proliferation of security equipment for schools has taken off" (cited in Light, 2002: 3). Schools are just one example of people's increased use and acceptance of security technologies in the United States. Government buildings, stores, offices, workplaces, recreation areas, streets, and homes have also been outfitted with CCTVs, biometric equipment, scanners, detectors, not to mention alarms, locks, and intercoms. At a security industry conference I attended as part of the research for this article, a spokesperson for a security corporation told conference participants that, according to research, in New York City an individual was likely to be caught on a security camera about seven times each day without knowing it; in London, the number was double that. Although the use of security technologies is often explained as a need during times of wanton violence and crime, the allure of technology and humans' fascination with gadgets and equipment partly explain why security technology is rapidly becoming a fixture in even the most idyllic areas. In the case of schools, though proponents of technologies warn against their misuse, they still believe that CCTVs, scanners, and other advanced technologies are essential for any overall school safety plan (Townley and Martinez, 1995; Kosar and Ahmed, 2000; Trump, 1999; Fickes, 2000). …