Safety concerns raised about other ways cameras on Pittsburgh Public Schools buses could be used

Pittsburgh Public Schools students are returning next week, which means yellow school buses will be back on the roads. 

More than 300 of those buses are equipped with AI-enabled Bus Patrol cameras, which record drivers who run the stop sign arm. These cameras helped police issue more than 9,500 violations in the 2025-26 school year — an 8% decline from the year before. 

Bus Patrol cameras have been on Pittsburgh Public Schools' bus fleet since 2023. The president and CIO of Bus Patrol, Justin Meyers, describes them as "high definition 4K cameras, as well as a proprietary AI system." 

But recent reporting has raised concerns that these cameras could be used for another kind of surveillance — one that's generating a lot of discussion nationwide. 

Earlier this year, tech journalism site 404 Media reported on internal documents that showed Bus Patrol allegedly working on a plan to turn its thousands of cameras into an Automatic License Plate Reader network for law enforcement. The report says documents describe a system, much like other ALPR networks like Flock, that would record a car's license plate and GPS location as it drives by the school bus. That information would be saved in a database and available for law enforcement searches. Referencing this report, Meyers told KDKA-TV, "We did say on the record that those articles were not accurate."

"We've seen ALPR vendors make deals with Bus Patrol and school bus companies," says Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice — a nonprofit public interest law firm that frequently litigates constitutional cases against the government. "Of course, that creates a risk that all of these devices are going to be repurposed and reused to feed into massive police surveillance databases." 

Meyers disputes this. 

"That is not under any circumstance what Bus Patrol does," he says. "It's an entirely different type of technology than the high-speed ALPR technology discussion that's going on a national level right now." 

Megan Patton, director of pupil transportation with Pittsburgh Public Schools, says the district has not heard anything about plans to turn Bus Patrol cameras into ALPRs. She says it's not something the company can just do on its own. 

"We'd have to work closely with Bus Patrol and we'd have to have a new contract in place, and our board would have to approve it," Patton said. 

She says even when the cameras capture video of a crime — like when a driver in Marshall-Shadeland ran a bus stop arm and hit a child in 2024 — the district reviews the video from on or off the bus before handing it over to law enforcement. 

"There is a process in place for school police to check out the video," she says.

"No one objects to using cameras on school buses to ticket people who are disobeying traffic laws and putting children in danger," says Soyfer. 

But he says the concern is that targeted surveillance could expand. 

"ALPRs themselves used to be very limited devices that were used in very limited ways," he says. But the addition and expansion of artificial intelligence to police surveillance could be used "to surface really intrusive, really intimate, really sensitive insights about people's daily lives."

Meyers disagrees that Bus Patrol's cameras have anything in common with ALPR networks. 

"I think the only time that I've ever seen folks have broad-scale concern over this technology on school buses that's designed to protect kids is when they're misinformed and don't fully understand how the technology works, or are confusing it with some other technologies that they may have some concerns around."

As AI advancements and new technologies make broad surveillance possible — while pushing the boundaries of privacy — PPS' Megan Patton says she's still got a bottom line. "My biggest thing is: it's a student and you don't want a tragedy occurring."