Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
St. Paul wants to spend $1.2 million for body cameras, half of it a grant from the feds.
GoPro costs $500 each. For the good ones. Retail.
And there are chinese knockoffs for under $200 that, according to some sources, are even better.
But the political optics aren’t right for that…
What are we buying with the rest of the million dollars?
Joe Doakes
That would be so interesting to find out…
Whatever the rest is used for, when Democrat controlled government entities get federal funds, they will put it into their slush fund for entitlement programs, then have to raise taxes to replace that money when it runs out.
Storage of the recordings is rather expensive.
I don’t know Chuck, have you seen how cheap a 5 terabyte drive is these days? I saw an external one the other day for $150.
Buy votes?
the image integrity/chain of evidence requirements get to be financially onerous – because they’ll want to keep each video at least 3 years or until the statute of limitations runs out for potential civil lawsuits. Then you’ll want a separate server for the recordings that are attached to charged/prosecuted incidents and those you’ll probably want to archive permanently. Its going to get expensive – they’ll need more money!
I tend to agree with Kel. The cost of HDD storage and infrastructure is irrelevant to the cost of humans categorizing, maintaining, and dealing with the data these days. Where I work we don’t even bother with tape backup anymore, we just image out to HDDs and put them on the shelves.
Just for giggles…..about 1-2GB/hour, uncompressed, 150 or so officers on the street at any given time, 8760 hours per year. I’m getting about 2000 TB/year in storage.
Somewhat less when you assume that a fair number of officers are in the office, but we’re still talking a huge amount of data, even after it’s compressed. I’d guess the cost is that, plus probably a few employees to go through the files after a few months to delete those that are “boring”.
Taser offers cloud storage for $30 per officer per month, call it $50,000 per year? Not cheap, but what was the bill for Ferguson?
Loren; Funny you should mention the low cost of a terabyte of storage today.
An old customer of mine and I were reminiscing over beers last night and we talked about when we first met back in 1990 – 1995 when I was selling into IBM mainframe shops. Then a terabyte would set a company back about $1 million bucks and take up floor space larger that the playing field at the old Metrodome.