Police Cams

[XT]

@markn_1

I didn’t say anything about the difficulty of managing the data, which I’m sure is quite as complex as you describe. I was specifically talking about the idea of the body cam transmitting the video to a car unit which stores the data. There’s no difference in data management between the current system where the video is stored in the body cam and then transferred to your server, vs. the hypothetical system where the video is stored in the car and then transferred to your server. It’s the same amount of data.

You’re right, my calculation was off. I calculated the storage for ONE officer for a month rather than 2000 officers. If you’re getting 30 GB per day per officer, your video quality is higher than I expected, or your camera’s compression is pretty crappy. Based on your numbers, 2000 officers at 30 GB per day is 1800 TB per month, which is indeed a lot of data. Nevertheless, you need to handle the same amount of data on the server whether the data is initially stored on the camera, in the car, or transmitted directly to the server.

No, you didn’t. Here, try this site which has a video calculator, though you can Google up others (I’m not going to give the one we use since it’s tied to the vendor we use for video). You will see that we are actually at the low end. We have tweaked the frame rate, compression and quality so that it’s ONLY (approximately) 30 GB a day per officer.

And yeah…it’s a hell of a lot of data to support. Saying you just need to handle it is like saying that we should just go to Mars and NASA just needs to handle it. They will say, sure, no problem…got your check book?

[MikeF]

I have to disagree that there are many people who are audio and video recorded for their entire working day. Dispatchers are recording when taking calls and actually dispatching but not in between. Cashiers are video recorded but not audio recorded. And its not them that’s being recorded, its the register or other sensitive area. When you start making audio recordings of people you begin to run afoul of wiretapping laws. I’d like one example of a job that is both audio and video recorded for an entire shift. And by that I mean position/employee not the physical location (although I can’t think of one of those, either).

While we’re at it, why not record every surgery with audio/video for later review in case something went wrong? If the OR staff isn’t doing anything wrong, why would they object?

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@k9bfriender

Why does anyone need to classify it as “non-public”?

This footage is not going to be available to the public. This will only be available to the police department, and to any prosecution or defense lawyers who need it for evidence. Any footage that gets released to the public would have already been vetted through several hands, many of which would have great interest in protecting the privacy of any victims.

I do not see this as an issue in any way, shape or form.

Ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Except for specifically-designated types, all info is available to the public upon request. And the copyright act also specifies that any information created by the government is public domain.

Even assuming that we changed laws to make this video non-public, you say any footage releases would be “vetted through several hands” – that’s the problem: how many additional staff would the police have to hire to do this vetting? How many clerks to keep the records. How many lawyers to respond to requests?

And you mentioned defense lawyers. How long before they start using the tactic of requesting huge amounts of video footage, to slow the prosecution down, and make it so expensive that the prosecutor will settle for a plea deal?* Request video of every arrest this police officer has made in the past 2 years, to see if there’s a pattern of police brutality. And then reporters or bloggers could also request video as “press” working on a news story.

I think this could easily be an issue – costly & expensive to the taxpayers.

• Already this is done with a flurry of discovery subpoenas demanding copies of every document with any possible connection – thousands of pages often.