Opinion: Installing Cameras on Campus is a Bad Idea™

On Wednesday, March 12, the Presidential Council on Campus Climate (PCCC) sent an email condemning the racist graffiti in the lower GCC bathroom. The email discussed actions that are "being considered" to prevent such an act from happening again. One of these acts was "[i]nstalling cameras in specific areas of campus that have seen incidents of hate speech to better identify the individual(s) who are engaging in this reprehensible behavior." This is, to put it simply, a bad idea.

Let me begin by emphasizing that the racist graffiti is disgraceful and unacceptable. It has no place at Reed or anywhere else, and I support reasonable measures to curb such acts. Unfortunately, installing cameras on campus is unreasonable and will not achieve this goal. The email implies that the cameras would be installed by the lower GCC bathrooms, since that's where the graffiti was found. The first issue with this is that people go in and out of those bathrooms all the time. Between people hanging out in Pool Hall, going to get their mail, and hanging out at the GCC, a huge number of people use the lower GCC bathrooms every day. Even if any new racist graffiti is reported immediately, enough people cycle in and out that it would be impossible to question everyone who’s used the bathrooms. Second, since the entire student body received the email from the PCCC, whichever student is doing the graffiti—assuming that it is in fact a student and not some dipshit high schooler—will probably take care not to make it obvious to the cameras that they're the one doing it.

Aside from feasibility issues, installing cameras would give the College undue power to monitor students. At the risk of making a slippery slope argument, it's natural to wonder what else cameras could be used for once they are installed. Assuming new graffiti shows up, what happens if a student shows up on the cameras hitting a weed pen? Will they get in trouble? Or would any footage be exclusively used for identifying the people doing the graffiti? What constitutes proper use of footage could be qualified, of course, but this alone would be a nightmare. And policies are always subject to change. As Piper S. McKeever ‘26 put it, "Once cameras go up, they're not coming down."

Or at least not willingly, which brings me to my third point: students will just knock the cameras down. I think it's pretty clear to everyone that knocking down cameras would be remarkably easy. Reedies hate institutional power and they love rebelling. What do we think will happen immediately if cameras go up in the GCC?

What puts me off the most is the fact that this was included in a PCCC email. For those of you who don't know, the PCCC has some big names on it, including the Vice President of the College, the Vice President for Student Life, and the Dean of the Faculty, to name a few. Even so, I'm not personally worried that cameras will actually go up anytime soon. But I figured it was worth getting it out there that putting up cameras would be impractical, costly, and a threat to the autonomy of students and student spaces. There is absolutely no place for racist graffiti on campus. But cameras won't fix that.