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Police Body Camera Business All About the Video Evidence Storage
Lucas123 writes: Body cameras are the fastest growing segment of the police video camera business. The two largest police body camera manufacturers today — Taser and VieVu — say they've shipped devices to 41% of the nation's 18,000 police departments. But, the hardware is only the basis for the real business: video evidence storage. Last year, Taser's gross profit margins on hardware were 15.6%; the gross margins for video storage were 51%, according to Glenn Mattson, who follows Taser as an equity analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann. "There's no contest. They don't care about making money on the cameras," Mattson said. As of the first quarter of this year, more than a petabyte of police video has been uploaded to Taser's Evidence.com service. Just one of VieVu's clients, the Oakland PD, has uploaded more than a million police videos. The cost of storage, however, is so high that police departments have been forced to determine strict retention policies, that in some cases may effect the long-term handling of evidence. In Birmingham, Ala., for example, where they've deployed 300 cameras and hope to double that this year, the the video cameras themselves cost about $180,000, but the department's total outlay for a five-year contract including cloud storage with Taser will be $889,000.
It is a market ripe for some competition.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm sure the various police departments will come up with a comprehensive policy for retention of evidence that will be completely glitch-free and non-controversial. .........
And if you believe that, I'd got a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
5 terabytes, $150.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So they've spent $180k a year including 5 years of storage. Doesn't sound too out of line and there's third party validation. I bet there's added expense for verifying and exporting data for prosecution and expert testimony fees.
So when does the public get access to data we paid for?
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What surprises me is that video storage is an issue at all. With 1 PB falling under $15,000 (two Backblaze Storage Pod 4.5s), coupled with a NAS head. 45Drives has 450 terabyte units with FreeNAS for $8800 each.
On the other hand, evidence.com pricing isn't that bad either. $100 per officer per month gets unlimited storage. This is a very inexpensive price to pay relatively... far cheaper than dealing with even one lawsuit.
If take into account the "Razors and Razorblades" business model for the storage, the costs don't sound too far out of line. While certainly this is far more expensive than just buying some JBODs of near-line disk, such an installation would not be nearly good enough for legal evidence.
That said, for larger departments, this is just begging for a short-term local disk (with some sort of certified software) along with swift duplication to WORM LTO cartridges.
18,000 departments, and I did some quick googling to estimate 800,000 state and local law enforcment individuals. More than cost, what preserves the public interest in access legitimacy, integrity, durability, and destruction of information? If private corporations provide such services using proprietary systems, how can anyone base legal arguments on such information given the lack of visibility and assurance in those concerns? If multiple systems are developed to provide said properties how can that be considered economically efficient given the substantial costs in assurance. It would seem as though there are two fundamental currencies in such a system, access and artifacts. Each of those currencies can be managed via a distribute crypto-currency technology (aka bitcoin). The community transaction clearing responsibility would be offered by a consortium of public/non-profit and volunteer "auditors of liberty". The municipal and state agencies are currently (2015) paying $300/yr per officer or 240M/yr. I can see no reason that number does not increase dramatically with services/addons (and greed) as this industry embeds itself more in the critical necessity of the criminal justice system. If half that $ is initially required of the users, and the community of ACLU, American Bar Association, Police Union (a robust system protects both the accused as well as the accuser) as well as other stakeholders contribute; I believe that a trust can be established to well support the development and deployment of such a system. There is an opportunity and a responsibility to provide a critical service to protect the rights and digity of ourselves as individuals and as a community.
Spread the idea and make it happen. Nerds and Geeks to the rescue of society.
for(;;);
Before anyone gets too worked up, a 50% GROSS profit margin is nothing too exciting for something that is basically a software business. If it were a 50% NET profit margin then that would be different and the net profit margin is the one that really matters - it's the so-called bottom line. Gross profit margins are just the revenue minus the direct cost involved in the service (direct labor and materials mostly). It does not include cost of sales, marketing, overhead, administration, indirect labor, utilities, etc)
For comparison software companies typically have gross margins considerably higher than 50%. For example Microsoft had a 66% gross profit margin last quarter. A manufacturing company typically has gross profit margins between 10-30%. GM and Lockheed Martin have gross profits of around 11% for example. Toyota has gross profits around 20%.
It leads to not keeping things around just because it was easier/cheaper than figuring out what to keep. Seems trivial to flag all open cases/complaints etc and ditch the rest after a set period.
It also should not be a cheap NAS box onsite, It should be written out to multiple worm tapes with full audit logging. Throw in cryptographic signing preferably with a third party so you need 3 people to collude rather than 2 and happen on the device as well (with a key generated on the device within TPM type hardware). Hashes should be generated to so there is a paper trail to help prove the video has not been altered. Physical security of at least one WORM tape.
At the end of the day it should be implemented with the least amount of trust as possible, the cop should have that hash to protect himself. The camera signing the footage coupled with a cosigning from a 3rd party makes it hard to tamper with the data. WORM tapes make it very hard to alter after the fact. A physically secured copy gives the opposing side something to examine.
Sure all this can be gotten around point is to make it very hard to do so, and that no one break after the fact can succeed.
No sir I dont like it.
There are entire industries built around data storage and administration solutions for regulatory compliance; it's not a trivial matter to create a system that will pass legal muster. This is far more than just a simple file repository; there's some initial software design, and also high ongoing administration costs (lots of paperwork inevitably involved.) Farming out this responsibility to a 3rd-party is a perfectly reasonable decision.
After a month (or 6) compress it, encrypt it, tag it with metadata and throw it into Amazon Glacier for 1 cent a GB, plus upload fees (or send a copy of a physical hard drive...).
Unless they are reviewing a stream for a case, they really don't need everything to be instantly available.
Amazon and Google could go to each state and offer a state-wide contract that puts all of the data in their clouds for peanuts compared to what these providers charge.
Most cop haters think the cops will get the bad deal on body cams. But truth is police misconduct is few and far between and the camera's will now provide evidence on how unruly some suspects can be. It may even provide the cops with evidence to add further charges against a suspect. Dash cameras have been extremely helpful in proving a persons actions with police. Now it will become mobile and go into domestic violence scenes first hand documenting any aggressiveness.
I think what it will also do is show how being a police officer dealing with people is a job that requires being on your toes and sometimes being aggressive. It may very well give us all the rest of the story and criminals may very well change their tune if a camera is filming their actions. Its like having a Cops film crew with every police officer. What better way to document crime then this?
I work as a storage tech for a police video footage storage company. we guarantee indefinite archives, with five 9's of uptime in a secure location. At first people were skeptical of the prices, but using the latest high speed storage devices on a linux platform, theres simply no beating our performance. /dev/null (our in-house application) is automatic, and a monthly bill is generated once the null fills up which includes maintenance fees like replacing the old null with a fresh, empty null for storage. This fee, also referred to as an "invoice for the purchase of a Rolls Royce" is our only frustration as our billing system is confusing for customers. Things like "Vacation package, Spain" are actually the normal cost of sourcing fresh nulls and installing them. invoices for services such as "yacht" and "truffle pheasant" refer to our restore service which uses "/dev/urandom" technology to provide nearly infinite high quality video.
Storage to
Good people go to bed earlier.
Body cameras are the fastest growing segment of the police video camera business. The two largest police body camera manufacturers today — Taser and VieVu — say they've shipped devices to 41% of the nation's 18,000 police departments.
Any particular nation?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Body cameras haven't been around long enough to really know whether they will be predominantly exculpatory for the police or provide evidence of misconduct.
But doesn't relying on a vendor who has a financial interest in continued sales to police organizations in charge of storing possible evidence of police misconduct create a significant moral hazard for Taser?
If they come to be seen as an organization "too cooperative" with enforcement of rules against police misconduct, doesn't this imperil their image with the police and potential sales of equipment to the police? It would seem this would provide them with a subtle pro-police bias which could undermine the entire point of video cameras from the public's perspective.
Bringing new meaning to "Don't Tase me bro"?
Isn't anyone else overjoyed by the high price of storage? If this forces "strict retention policies", that is a win for privacy. While I also don't want to see evidence disappear and realize it is not always immediately obvious what is evidence of something, any time you have endless collection of data, it is ripe for privacy abuse.
"...the video cameras themselves cost about $180,000"
Choked on my sandwich on that one.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
One thing this setup does is to create a large target for criminals, foreign intelligence agencies, terrorists or anyone wanting to break into the video storage to learn about how a specific police department works.
Just the cost of reliable datacenter electricity alone costs more than that cheap spindle. Order that drive and see if it magically gets filled up with video, and magically makes backups of itself, which are stored for the proper amount of time before being rotated. Spindles are may 5% of enterprise storage costs (and they're not bottom of the barrel consumer drives).
If you're a cheapskate like me, you CAN do 5 TB for $3,000 NRC, plus $150 / month.
Times two for a backup site, so $6,000 NRC plus $300 / month.
Obviously you don't want to backup just once daily, you should have rolling backups, a backup copy from last week, a copy from last month, etc.
So $12,000 NRC plus $1,200 / month.
Plus daily transfer to the backup site sites, so $12,000 plus $1,600 / month.
Plus a qualified admin to manage this, including testing backups, replacing failed spindles, etc @ $100 / hour.
The "police video camera business" has segments?
Kinda like saying single handed garlic presses are the fastest growing segment of the garlic press business. Sure there's the occasional two-hander and the luxury hands-free garlic press, but they hardly qualify as market segments.
The cost of storage will come down somewhat as folks figure out they're getting screwed by the vendors.
But you need to come up with retention policies and rock hard evidence handling processes. Those are an extra cost
but the biggest cost of all with be if there's a conviction using the film. If so, you've got to store that for the length of the prison term for appeals and stuff. The cost of the cameras themselves is irrelevant over the lifetime of the "project." same old same old.
The real reason of this costly storage is that incriminating evidence of an LEO executing someone can be completely deleted at a moments notice, with the traces left behind as that of a cosmic ray / solar flare incident.
That there is zero talk of all the data being recorded to and held only by the DOJ is related to the same reason that there is _still_ no centralized, national database of LEOs shooting and killing people. It speaks volumes about the real agenda of state / local LEO w.r.t. all the minority communities nationwide. The Klan didn't so much disappear as having merely traded their white robes for blue and brown uniforms (and the license to murder with impunity).
Cloud services - it's the HP ink cartridge for the new age.
They're frequently not fungible - most vendors can't handle the bandwidth and storage requirements. You can't just move a few petabytes around without a bit of serious logistics or a really fat pipe. Consequently these data centers are swelling into bloated cash cow maintenance contracts. They probably should though, since a few exabytes of storage isn't easy to handle for an operation on the scale of Blahsville PD. Besides, having the footage out of the hands of the police means the process is a little less susceptible to corruption.
Downside: As that data continues flowing into their datacenter it naturally accumulates value. As we realize that value they'll jack up the price of access. They can charge $+INF and we'll have no option but to pay because there's no other way to get it. Who owns your data (the NSA, guffaw)? This isn't a question we've answered properly yet. Disks have value, electricity has value, bandwidth has value, the actual bytes...well...we're not sure about that part. Exception: The RIAA (MP3 bytes are very expensive).
You can't have an uber-schpiffy S/W front end with all the proper auditing options, and then just shove the back-end up to a generic public cloud; that would never pass muster; a defense lawyer would have a field day with it, and a judge would toss that evidence out on it's sorry tuchus. Too many people that are not the ones that would be testifying as to the chain-of-custody would have full R/W access to it.
There ARE ways to construct a cloud to have all the proper legal-compliance features, which is EXACTLY what Taser has sold the dept. mentioned in the summary.
Congratulations, you just re-invented Amazon Glacier (which cost $10/TB/month).
It's running on Amazon web services, says the article. Yea, they are making a killing. Makes me wonder why they don't just buy cloud storage themselves instead of through Taser.
It's like my first mechanic guru told me when we were fixing a problem with a customer's brakes - "$1 is for the tapping, and $5 is for knowing where to tap." :-) The customer complained about the $25 charge to fix his brakes (a stuck caliper slide as I recall) because it only took 10 minutes to fix (including time to pull the car into the bay and hoist it on the lift). "$5 for the tapping, and $20 for knowing where to tap." was the response... :-)