You should have nothing more to fear if the people you’re talking to can document what you said, no.
This isn’t a case of privacy invasion – the people in a conversation can surely repeat what was said. Being able to record only helps the powerless who would not otherwise be believed.
This is a far different case than a third-party listening in on an otherwise private conversation.
Please, don’t tell me to “Just. Stop. Right. There.” Converse, rather than trying to shut down conversations and points of view you disagree with. If you think it’s dangerous, tell me how, give me a scenario.
In Pennsylvania, where I have worked primarily (and Maryland, where I have worked a little), any roof drain or storm water runoff is never allowed to connect to the sewer system.
Rainwater must run to an entirely separate storm drain pipe, that terminates in a drain field or retention pond.
This is to prevent contamination of streams and rivers, when heavy rainfall could cause overflow of the sewage system.
I think that is where the issue is for the Mom. And to be honest that feels right. I don’t want anyone recording my kids without my or their consent. In our state we have forms that must be filed every year agreeing to or revoking the rights of the School to be able to take photos/videos of our kids and provide blanket consent as to how those will be utilized.
I truly hope nothing comes of the charges and it mainly is a tactic to stop her or any other parent from doing that. And most importantly I hope someone on the School administration side looks into the bullying the Mom is stating is happening. The real focus should be on what’s going on with the kids and how to intervene if bullying is happening.
So far, with regards to the recording, everything is working as intended. With cases like this the police are supposed to bring you up on charges and the DA is supposed to decide whether or not to prosecute. The police are supposed to enforce the law not interpret it. That’s the DA’s job.
Maybe you are involved with the justice system. For those of us who are not, being charged with an offense is a huge, stressful, and expensive experience.
Of course, we do not know about the history that led up to this event, which may have influenced everyone’s actions.
But at my kid’s school, it is apparently policy that the police “resource officer” does not get to decide if an incident is bullying or a fight. When there are injuries sufficient for one of those involved to need medical treatment, both kids are charged. And they don’t go to the principal’s office to explain themselves, they go through the court system.
Just think about that. Your child is a victim of bullying, and has complained repeatedly to the teacher and the administration. One day the teacher steps out of the room for a moment, and the bully comes up behind your kid, and knocks them out of their seat, and throws them against the wall. Then kicks your kid on the ground. Your kid, being a good student and a follower of rules, does not hit back. The “resource officer” is called, and talks to the teacher and some of the other kids. Then the officer, consulting with the Juvenile Justice people at the county court house, charges both kids with disturbing the peace, and the bully with assault. It does not matter that others in the class told the officer that your kid did not ever strike the bully, was not interacting with the bully before the attack, and was only guilty of being different. It does not matter that your kid is a straight A student with no disciplinary issues ever, but that the bully has been through the legal system many times.
The next step is an “intake hearing” with Juvenile Justice officials at the county court house. At that hearing, the person who advised the school cop to charge your child gets to decide if your kid should go free with no further action, be referred to the criminal court system for prosecution, or even if your child should be immediately taken from your custody and placed with the state. Think about the stress you experience taking your smart and well behaved child into that hearing. Think about the effect on your kid. You can try to shield her from worrying about her future in the week or so before the hearing. It will not work. So you take your sweet kid into the court house, are searched, then sit down in a room where you and your child are interrogated by a stranger, who demands to know all about your personal lives and child rearing practices. Then you are directed to wait in the corridor, where an officer watches you to make sure you don’t try to escape. You are finally summoned to learn your child’s, and your family’s fate.
This was my experience.
Unobtrusive recording devices don’t discriminate what they record.
Secretly placing a recording on someone is not the same as them consenting. You could argue the parent had a right to record her minor-aged daughter, but it’s a stretch to extend that to a right to record other kids in her daughter’s elementary school.
The you have nothing to fear if your innocent argument assumes a rational and impartial audience. In a world with YouTube, Facebook and cyberbullying, that’s a demonstrably unreasonable expectation. You could argue that adults should never say something to another that can’t be put on social media, and one-party consent states such as Virginia implicitly agree with that reasoning, but even then there are strict limitations. For example, you can’t wear a wire and then mingle in a crowd recording other people’s conversations. There are excellent reasons for this. If you want some specific examples, it could be used to out a gay person or embarrass a woman who worked on a video game you don’t like. But the larger point is not specific examples but that the court of public opinion is not always just, information is power and abusers, harassers and trollies need neither the majority of the public or the law itself to side with them in misusing that power. Expecting that people should only ever speak in private of things that bad actors could use to harass them is completely irrational. Privacy doesn’t end at your front door.
Finally, in this particular case, even if the legal reasoning is that the parent could consent on their child’s behalf, there are very good reasons for restricting the use of recording devices in schools, as children deserve a higher degree of protection of their privacy from the public given their greater vulnerability.
Now, allow me to be clear. The school administration was dangerously remiss in their duty to protect children in their charge from bullying. The mother broke school rules and may have broken the law, but she did so in order to protect her daughter where no one else was willing to. IMO the school district should face a civil suit for their negligence. At most the mother should get a legal slap on the wrist since a law that is not enforced is meaningless. But the proposed punishment is absolutely fucking insane and, while I’m ambivalent about jury nullification because it can be misused by prejudicial jurors, this is a clear case where it would make perfect sense.
Hopefully the prosecutor will be reasonable and either not press felony charges or seek a much smaller punishment for what was a very minor offense. Some prosecutors are reasonable, some have ramrods stuck up their asses, and some are self-serving politically motivated draconian disciplinarians pandering to angry voters. But it’s worth noting that the school would not be the one to press criminal charges. Only state and federal prosecutors have that power. One could argue that the school administrators should not have filed a police report, and I’m sympathetic to that argument, but if another parent or school employee had, the administrators might be culpable for failing to report a crime if it was determined the parent’s actions had broken the law.
There’s no reason to assume the mother was intending to publicly expose her daughter’s schoolmates, but rather sought conspicuous evidence the school administrators or district or PTA could not ignore. What she did might have been wrong, but she was backed into it. That context matters to her actions, and laws enforced without context are more dangerous to justice that the absence of laws.
TL;DR - I understand where you’re coming from, and under some circumstances I agree with you, but your stated position is too sweeping and overly simplistic IMO. Wiretapping is not a simple area of law, and for good reason as it must balance the rights of many. It’s also an area that will become increasingly challenging for society to cope with as technology continues to advance. Easy answers will be tempting, but not necessarily best or even just.
Is there an expectation of privacy in a public school classroom? I’m not sure. I’m also not sure it would be a bad idea to have a camera in every classroom which parents could log in to view.
We live in a country where if a woman claims she was groped twenty years ago, she is believed, and when a nine year old claims she was bullied yesterday, she is often ignored.
The idea that we’ve taken to radically believing women is nonsense coming from exaggerating a few media stories as if they were representative instead of outliers.
I’m pretty sure you live in a country where if 9 different women who don’t know each other each come forward and have their stories extensively researched by one of the nation’s leading newspapers - where if those stories are backed up by a huge number of accounts of a person being banned from a mall and from a YMCA, of personal accounts of that person engaging in a pattern of behaviour that fits what is described by the women - that a huge swath of people still do not believe.
You live in a country where if 16 women come forward and their stories are backed up by that persons own recorded words a huge swath of people still do not believe. People choose not to believe to the extent that they will vote such a person is as a senator or a president.
You are speaking in forums where when a guy came forward to say “That guy molested me” and the accused said, “I owe him an apology” still people wanted to give the accused the “benefit of the doubt”.
Not believing a nine-year-old about bullying and not believing an adult about sexual assault are the same phenomenon and it continues. Right now we feel like a lot of people are getting outed as sexual abusers, but it’s not a lot, it’s an insignificant fraction (a million would be a lot). If you are a Hollywood star you have the personal clout to come forward. If your abuser is a well known darling of “the left” or “the right” you might find enough support from interested parties to put together a compelling enough case (the Washington Post will help you tell your story about Roy Moore, Roger Stone will make sure your story about Al Franken gets out).
But if you stock the produce section and your boss likes to rub his crotch against you? Good luck taking the “we believe women” movement home, you’re about as powerful as a bullied nine-year-old.
We live in a country where the president of the United States said about a man accused by numerous women of underage sexual misconduct…”but we have to listen to his side too”.
You made a whole lot of good points up until the closer.
It is dreadful if that happens to a woman working in the produce section. But the law does not require her to be present in the same room as her abuser, five days a week, for years at a stretch.
Yes, that’s common in suburbs, but here is century old attached rowhouses, there’s no natural drainage. Plus it’s a combined sewer so it all goes to treatment, if it doesn’t overflow into the river that is. This was a flat roof pitched from both ends to the middle where there was a 4" cast iron pipe.
So it turns out covert surveillance of minors - who cannot give consent, in a space where their guardians have a reasonable expectation of privacy - is against the law.
Far out.
