School Bus Camera Enables Arrest

12-year-old boy arrested in connection with sexual assault of 3-year-old girl on a school bus.

It seems that the arrest may have been enabled by footage from a camera that had been installed in the bus this past summer. As an electrical engineer at a major school bus manufacturer, I've sometimes wondered about the effectiveness of on-board surveillance systems. We install pre-wiring for a few of our customers but it's not exactly a popular option. It is a relatively simple wiring setup. We don't currently install the cameras themselves, so I can't speak to that. Now I wonder if we aren't going to be setting up more buses for them in the future. There's no way a bus driver can see everything that goes on in a bus. And I've always heard that attorneys would much rather have video evidence than eye-witness accounts in any case. What with kids getting more and more brazen as time goes by, I'm betting we'll be hearing about more incidents like this one in the near future. That's a bet I'd quite happily lose but the odds seem stacked against it.