As more police departments – and state legislatures – weigh the use of police body cameras, cost has emerged as the leading barrier. In addition to funding the equipment, training and maintenance, departments and municipalities must also cover the considerable cost of storing video footage.
Storage costs, in fact, have proven to the be most expensive part of a body camera program, according to a Department of Justice Report, “Implementing a Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned.”
“Storing videos over the long term is an ongoing, extreme cost that agencies have to anticipate,” said Captain Thomas Roberts of Las Vegas in the report. While the cameras generally range in cost from $300 to $800 per officer, which is a fixed cost, the bill for storage can be close to $1,500 per year, per unit, which is an ongoing cost.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are coming up with creative solutions to minimize their storage costs for body cameras, so let’s take a look at three of them.
Shorter Retention Times for Non-Evidentiary Video
Having officers record all of their interactions during a shift can produce a mountain of footage in a pretty short period of time, even for small departments.
To deal with the deluge, departments are categorizing video as “evidentiary” or “non-evidentiary” and requiring shorter retention times for non-evidentiary footage. According to the DOJ report, evidentiary video “involves footage of an incident or encounter that could prove useful for investigative purposes, such as a crime, an arrest or citation, a search, a use of force incident, or a confrontational encounter with a member of the public.”
For footage that doesn’t meet those criteria, the most common retention time was 60-90 days, with outliers as short as seven days and as long as a year. For serious offenses such as homicide, the retention period is generally indefinite.
Separate Solution for Long-Term Storage
Most departments either store their footage on an in-house server that’s managed internally or on an online cloud database that’s handled by a third-party vendor.
For footage related to serious offenses, departments have policies that allow for the videos to be copied to a disc or external storage solution and deleted from the in-house server or cloud. Copying the footage over frees up expensive storage space for video that’s part of ongoing investigations or that has shorter retention requirements.
Passing on the Storage Costs
Some cities and states are experimenting with special taxes and surcharges to fund their body camera programs – with mixed results.
In Dallas, lawmakers have proposed using forfeiture funds to cover their costs, and in Philadelphia, the mayor has suggested a 3-cent surcharge on sugary drinks. In New Jersey, a measure has been blocked that would have instituted a $25 surcharge on drunk drivers. The bill was ruled unconstitutional because it created an “unconstitutional financial burden on local governments.”
