Dallas Unveils Super-Safe New School Bus With Rear-View “Pedophile Finder”

Worried that a child molester is tailing your kid’s school bus,
just waiting for an opportunity to swoop inside and seize your
child? Fear no longer. The Dallas Observer
reports:

Dallas County Schools…sent word last Friday
that it was preparing to unveil the “School Bus of the Future,” and
that this futuristic vehicle will “will revolutionize school bus
transit and exponentially increase the safe passage of students to
and from school.”…

A brief glance won’t tell you the new buses are equipped with
voice-over-IP communication systems, or that they transmit data on
speed, location and acceleration in real-time. The “Thumbs-Up!”
thumbprint scanner, which keeps track of which kids are on the bus
and whether they’re supposed to be there, is also hard to see
unless you’re really pressing your face to the glass, as are the
multiple interior security cameras.

Slightly easier to notice is the rear-facing camera, dubbed—no
joke—the “Pedophile Finder.”

“I wish we could have come up with a better name for it,” says
Dallas County Schools spokeswoman Allison Allison. (Yes, that’s the
correct name.) The camera, mounted on the top portion of the school
bus and positioned to capture the license plate of tailing
vehicles, isn’t just to catch pedophiles. It could be a parent who
lost custody of their child, or a kidnapper. But “Pedophile Finder”
was the name that stuck.

“The bus driver can’t tell if somebody’s tailing him but if they
recognize a pattern of a car following a bus” based on video, they
can take appropriate measures.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what those “appropriate
measures” might be. The bus does not come with a rear-mounted
machine gun, so it’s not that.

Dallas parents can see the “BusGuard System” specs here, can read a press
release about the buses here,
and can look for homeschooling support groups
here.

[Via
Lenore Skenazy and Maggie
McNeill.]