Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sure, a drive is cheap ... having a robust and secure system (which I doubt they have) which gives you retention policies and other stuff suitable for evidentiary purposes is a much harder problem.
And then you get into some other stuff.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That may be a part of the advantage of going with one of these vendors. We sometimes hear about malfunctioning cameras when police are accused of abuse. Sometimes multiple cameras malfunction at the same time.
A properly designed system would make deleting evidence difficult, and even if the evidence were to be deleted, it would likely leave an audit trail showing that the video did indeed exist at one point and reveal when and how it was deleted.
Oh, I have no doubt that Taser is overcharging ... and I strongly suspect they're not as secure and robust as they need to be for something warehousing police data. But the cost of increased storage is seldom limited solely by the cost of the media.
And for legal purposes of any organization with a real retention schedule for whom failing to comply is a risk ... you can't just buy a cheap hard drive and pretend you've solved the problem.
If these things are going to be legal records, they need to be secure, backed up, under a strict retention schedule, retrievable.
Which tells me if you think the added cost of that kind of storage is 'crap' you've probably never done it.
Sure, they're probably gouging, but there better be more to it than just slapping in cheap drives to a cheap machine ... or they'll find themselves explaining to a whole bunch of police forces why they're doing that.
Unless of course all of these police forces have been hoodwinked into buying a system with a license which says "this system may or may not work, but we're not responsible if it doesn't". In which case law enforcement are really terrible at IT contracts.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
It's no worse than the video being in the possession of the police themselves. Citizens who want to protect themselves against police misconduct will have to take their own video as they have had to in the past.