Pressure on police departments to deploy body cameras is boiling over as outrage intensifies over the deadly police shooting in South Carolina in which a North Charleston officer shot and killed an unarmed black man as he ran away earlier this month. A video of the April 4 shooting was filmed by a bystander showing a far different version of events than cops officially reported, renewing calls for video as a requirement.
In contrast, the move by Boston police and prosecutors to release security video of a gunfight that left a police officer wounded and the suspect dead has been widely praised — and renewed calls for body cams here.
Only in recent years has cloud computing made it feasible to start thinking about saving and maintaining the deluge of video data from police-worn cameras. Cloud computing allows anyone to store reams of data on far-flung servers managed by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.
Because most cloud storage platforms don’t meet the FBI’s security policy standards, many departments have forgone the cloud thus far. But the drawbacks of local storage are numerous, requiring police departments to hire IT personnel for maintenance and security.
Police departments thinking of investing in body cameras should expect to encounter cyberattacks. Locally stored police data is already a huge target of hackers, with departments regularly fending off malicious cyberattacks.
By contrast, cloud computing centers are incredibly secure — in fact they’re arguably some of the most secure facilities on the planet, with their locations often kept secret. Armed guards and retinal scans are the norm.
Storing that data is more expensive than purchasing the actual cameras. According to the Police Executive Research Foundation, the cost of data storage can reach $2 million per year for a department. A typical urban police department should expect data from its body-worn cameras to accumulate several terabytes of data per month. Oakland police, with 600 body cameras, report that their servers are crammed with a whopping seven terabytes of data per month. Think of that as about 1,500 feature-length films.
In Fort Collins, Colo., for example, cops discard footage after seven days if there is no citizen contact. Other departments keep everything. In Albuquerque, non-evidentiary video is retained for a year. In Oakland, that data is stored for five years.
Microsoft recently piloted the first FBI-compatible data storage program for police video, a program using its Azure cloud storage system with VIEVU, a Seattle-based maker of wearable police cameras, likely opening the door for many police departments to start storing data in the cloud. As a result, police departments should be able to keep and manage data longer and for a lower cost, putting to rest arguments that cop body cameras are too financially burdensome and not feasible for small departments. Storing all that data is only going to get easier.
©2015 the Boston Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
