6A / NEWS / MONDAY, APRIL 18, 2011 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
CAMPUS
Cameras serve as campus eyes
BY CHRIS NEAL
cneal@kansan.com
A camera monitors campus for suspicious behavior. The KU Public Safety Office hires 12 students to keep an eye on more than 200 security cameras.
If students ever feel like someone is watching them while they are walking around campus, they may be right.
Twelve students hired by the KU Public Safety Office are the eyes and ears for KU police officers every night. With more than 200 cameras scattered throughout the campus, they have seen some crazy things.
Ryan Black, a sophomore from Emporia, has monitored the cameras for a year and a half. He said sometimes he's surprised by what he sees, like a situation where he was watching a man on campus who didn't look suspicious at first.
"It didn't look like anything suspicious going on," Black said. "The guy just randomly picked up a bike and threw it at a yellow Mustang."
Black also said that the cameras would sometimes catch people smoking marijuana or even starting fires outside of the residence halls.
In order to secure the entire campus, KU Public Safety has access to view other departments' cameras, like the ones belonging to the Ambler Student Recreation Fitness Center, even though they don't own those cameras.
Before being able to monitor the cameras, students have to turn in applications, pass a criminal history check, learn how to operate the system and go through
training on what to look for.
They are trained to recognize suspicious situations and how they differ from regular situations, KU Police Captain Schuyler Bailey said.
CAMERA CAPABILITIES
For those living in the residence halls, there's no need to worry about the cameras peeking into their rooms.
When a person operating the cameras zooms in toward the windows of any of the residence halls, solid gray blocks appears over the window, which prevents the camera operator from seeing inside.
Touch screen monitors also help the operators keep an eye on the campus by allowing them to see 13 different cameras at once. The operator has a map of the Lawrence campus on one screen, and just by touching an area of the map and dragging it to the next screen, he or she can pull up the camera that is positioned in that area.
Jamry Jones, a senior from Atlanta and the student security supervisor for KU Public Safety, said the cameras couldn't be any better. He said that inside Allen Fieldhouse, they can even see the jalapeños in nachos.
"In the Fieldhouse, the cameras are so good." Jones said. "We can see everything. I can see the hair on your head and where you are looking with your eyes."
BEYOND BIG BROTHER
The security cameras are not used just for watching suspicious-looking people. They are used for many different things, especially during sports events.
Ticket scalpers at football and basketball games are supposed to stay off University grounds. Cameras set up across from the Fieldhouse and all around Memorial Stadium keep an eye on ticket scalpers to be sure they follow the rules.
The cameras also help with traffic flow after sports events
by allowing the camera operator to see when traffic is increasing and when it's going back to normal. When traffic gets heavy, the operators will see this and have the traffic police get into positions to help smooth out the traffic flow.
Then, once traffic slows back down, the camera operators will call the traffic units back in and allow the streets to return to normal.
Edited by Amanda Sorell
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Candidates could be asked to prove their citizenships
PHOENIX — Arizona, a state that has shown little reluctance in bucking the federal government, is again plowing controversial political ground, this time as its Legislature passed a bill to require President Barack Obama and other presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship before their names can appear on the state's ballot.
If Gov. Jan Brewer signs the proposal into law, Arizona would be the first state to pass such a requirement — potentially forcing a court to decide whether the president's birth certificate is enough to prove he can legally run for re-election. Hawaii officials have certified Obama was born in that state, but so-called "birthers" have demanded more proof.
"Mr. Obama drew the question out, but it's not about him," Seel said, noting his bill would also require statewide candidates to complete an affidavit showing they meet the qualifications for those offices, which include U.S. citizenship.
"Arizona is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We've cut school funding. And they pass a bill questioning Obama's citizenship? For real?" said Democratic Sen. Kyristen Sinema of Phoenix, an opponent of the bill.
Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama's citizenship, and his Hawaiian birth certificate, has been made public. Even though the courts have rebuffed lawsuits challenging Obama's eligibility, the issue hasn't gone away.
Republican Rep. Carl Seel of Phoenix, the bill's author, said the president's birth record wouldn't satisfy the requirements of his proposal and that Obama would have to provide other records, such as baptismal certificates and hospital records. But Seel said the measure wasn't intended as a swipe against the president and instead was meant to maintain the integrity of elections.
Opponents say Arizona's bill gives the state another black eye after lawmakers approved a controversial immigration enforcement law last year, considered legislation asserting state rights, and made it illegal to create "human-animal" hybrids by fertilizing human eggs with nonhuman sperm and vice versa.
Whether Arizona's measure would be found constitutional is an open question, legal scholars say.
Birthers have maintained since the last presidential election that Obama is ineligible to hold the nation's highest elected office because, they argue, he was actually born in Kenya, his father's homeland. Obama's mother was an American citizen.
No one knows for sure what the term means, said Gabriel J. Chin, a University of Arizona law professor who is an expert in citizenship and immigration law. "Natural-born citizen" was modeled after a phrase used in British law, and the U.S. Supreme Court has never defined it, he said.
The governor, who has until the end of business Thursday to act on the proposal, declined to say whether she would sign the measure. "That bill is an interesting piece of legislation. I certainly have not given it a whole lot of thought with everything that's been on my plate," said Brewer, a social conservative who has vetoed four bills and signed more than 100 others since the legislative session began in January.
The U.S. Constitution requires that presidential candidates be "natural-born" citizens, be at least 35 years old, and be a resident of the United States for at least 14 years.
But the term "natural-born citizen" is open to interpretation — and many bloggers, politicians and others have weighed in.
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