Vandals caused over $400,000 in damage to ACT public schools last year but without CCTV coverage, police are limited in their ability to identify offenders and track down those responsible.
Despite the expense and inconvenience to staff and students caused by the vandalism, the ACT Education Directorate said it did not support installing CCTV in its schools due to potential breaches of privacy, even though new camera technologies are available which avoid those breaches.
Instead, it said: "The assessment and mitigation of security risks is managed by schools as part of their broader approach to operational risk management."
It said the cost of vandalism "varies from year to year".
"In 2022, a total of $291,851 was spent. In 2023, a total of $400,056 was spent," the directorate said in a statement.
It would not provide specifics on which schools have been worst hit.
"Schools most impacted by vandalism vary from year to year, and are not identified to mitigate further opportunistic vandalism," it said.
However, the cost of repairs to Amaroo School in the past six months alone was revealed to be $20,135.
Around 90 per cent of Canberra's schools are fenced at their perimeter which provided a deterrent effect on vandalism when first installed, but now much less so.
Fencing of school-linked infrastructure like ovals, courts and playgrounds also is a contentious issue as these are considered shared community assets, and security fencing an eyesore.
In a May 2022 inquiry to the ACT Legislative Assembly, it was reported "stakeholders expressed different views ... regarding the desirability of fencing and locked gates which do protect school infrastructure but may decrease community access to and the perception that schools are part of local communities".
The ACT Council of Social Service told the same inquiry it was important "wherever possible, we open and expand" these types of resources "for the wider ACT population, especially as the city becomes denser".
Outside of schools, there are more than 6425 CCTV cameras across the ACT government network, a response to an ACT Assembly question on notice late last year revealed.
These include fixed and portable CCTV cameras, public bus cameras and live traffic monitoring cameras but does not include bushfire surveillance cameras used by the Emergency Services Agency, and cameras owned and managed by third-party building owners such as the ACT Law Courts.
Human rights and privacy legislation in the ACT prevents the use of facial recognition software but the latest AI technology allows a search of the footage using clothing colour, gender and age categories.
Some camera systems in the ACT now use machine learning and AI, in which "appearance search" and "video pattern technology" perform a similar role to facial recognition but avoid breaching privacy laws.
The education directorate said it worked with police "on our shared interest in matters of safety relating to ACT public schools".
"This includes regular meetings to address operational issues that require information-sharing and problem-solving," it said.
Some of the "mitigation strategies" used include security patrols of ACT public schools.
"Other risk-mitigation strategies can be implemented depending on the risks at a site," it said.
"These ... include security screens, motion sensor lighting, increased frequency of security patrols and in some cases, the use of static guards.
"The potential future use of CCTV as a crime deterrent will be considered as part of the directorate's planning for implementation of the ACT Protective Security Framework."
