High Security Schools

Heard a quote once about how banks had security with the traditional vault, armed guards, security cameras and panic button to alert the police just being standard features.

Its built to be a safe place to keep money.

Anyone who want to grab the money inside would have to deal with all that security.

But schools to keep children....not so much. Most schools don't even have armed guards.

Anyone who wants to go in and grab (or harm) the children would likely face much less opposition.

Any comments?

edited 21st Aug '12 10:15:02 PM by Natasel

The trick is that children are expected to attract crime much less than a huge pile of money does.

My problem with this is more or less summarized in the article about Columbine. In my experience, the security measures implemented at our school as a reaction to the shootings (the closest thing I have to a test case for a high security school) were halfhearted at best. They were a Potemkin Village solution that actually saw me punished for fighting back against bullying a couple of times.

I don't believe school administrations treat these kinds of problems seriously until something happens in their district; they generally have "more important things" to worry about.

What? There were all sorts of security measures at my high school. We had a huge fuckoff fence with a gate that was closed during school hours, armed police officers that patrolled the halls, and metal detectors at every entrance.

edited 22nd Aug '12 2:51:15 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

Then your school definitely took it more seriously than mine.

It was mostly because we had a large gang problem. Which, incidentally, is also why we had the fugliest uniforms known to man.

Armed police? At a school? That's seriously fucked up.

Yep. They had them in middle school too. Then again, it wasn't like it was unwarranted or anything, since kids wound up getting arrested pretty regularly.

Three reasons:

1) Unlike money, children are capable of running away from trouble or calling for help.

2) Also unlike money, most children will object to being crammed into a tiny box with no lights or ventilation.

3) While it is possible for thieves to trade children in exchange for goods and services, trading stolen money is by far the easier task.

You mean most people didn't have an armed police officer at their school?

Weird.

Then again because my schools were in a low-crime area, I thought they were mostly to condition us to the concept of big brother more than anything else.

The only days there were cops in any school I went to were road safety awareness days. But there wasn't much crime where I lived either (plus, I don't live in a country where any nut can have thirty guns).

There were fences, though.

edited 22nd Aug '12 4:32:31 AM by Medinoc

Having security guards and great big fences in schools just seems really weird to me. I think the closest thing our school had to a security guard was somebody who occasionally walked around it at night in case idiots tried to vandalise stuff. Our fence was... an extremely ragged hedge that people walk through in order to get to the shops on the next block.

The rate of violent/kidnapping/other related crime from outside of the school is laughably low. This makes all the fences, locked doors and other security measures designed to keep people out pretty pointless.

The chances of something more violent then a scuffle breaking out is also incredibly low and the kinds of nuts who shoot up a school won't be deterred by a cop or metal detector.

Not to mention that kids will subvert any security measures put in place. Our highschool had automatically locking doors. Everyone just jammed stuff in the locks to prevent them from closing.

I think that this is one of the most fucked-up things I've ever heard of.

Mine had the usual cement walls topped with imbeded broken glass and guards carrying small arms at the entrance/exit.

Which fell far short of the bank guards with automatic rifles and other extras.

See, that sounds pretty horrific to me. Where was this?

Also, I don't think I've ever seen an armed guard at a bank either. Or any kind of guard, actually.

edited 22nd Aug '12 6:38:04 AM by imadinosaur

Why does a bank need a guard? The money's insured.

And in a safe, and the police are a panic button push away, and having armed guards would just escalate the situation. In fact, I'm pretty sure banks instruct their staff to just give money to any bank robbers without resistance.

That's the kind of things we put around prisons, not schools.

That seems weird. If they gave the money to the robbers easily, then wouldn't that just encourage more robbery?

If they ask their staff to risk their life for the money, that would leave the bank open to lawsuits when people inevitably die from that policy. Also, a shooting in a branch would be far worse for business than handing over a few thousand dollars (if the robbers went for the safe, the police would arrive before they could leave).

The banks will hope for the police to catch the robbers, but in general will just write off the occasional bank robbery as the price of doing business - and they have insurance for this stuff, so it won't kill them.

Ideally no, because the bank robbers get arrested on their way out.

I don't think the banks can ethically advise their employees to do anything else, anyway.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Gaah.

edited 22nd Aug '12 8:27:12 AM by Muramasan13

TBH it probably *does* bring about more bank robberies, but less deaths for a few more robberies is a worthwhile trade.

The only time my last school ever had a gate was after someone found a dead body on the grounds (I'm oversimplifying there, but still...), and that was just a temporary thing to keep the press out. And I mean temporary; it was a few bits of the same metal fencing you find around building sites.

My high school was built to the template of a small prison almost. We didn't have cameras and armed guards or anything like that, but we did have a relatively secure perimeter and specific entry and exit points from the grounds.

Not that it ever stopped me from hopping the fence to ditch my last period as a junior and senior, we didn't have barbed wire.