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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.
May I remind the law enforcement agencies that, despite video file storage being ubiquitous and cheap, they have to abide by the inexplicably DMCA-entangled file formats of the camera's and their overpriced storage servers. No reverse engineering the trivial protection scheme and buying cheap servers. You are vendor-locked.
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Hardly relevant to the discussion. We are talking about enterprise storage and backup, with archival record-keeping. At a minimum I would expect two physically separated sites for storage and online duplication, plus backup and additional offsite storage. That's all stuff that comes along with the cloud storage contracts.
When you start getting up over 100k per year as Birmingham is, it might start to look attractive to take it in-house. Depending on what sort of data storage and retention infrastructure they already have, it might make sense to build out for this purpose as well. But smaller departments will never have the capacity for doing this in-house. Not only do you need the servers, storage systems, networks and backups at two sites, you also need a 24/7 staff capable of handling it. That's way more than 100k per year just in labor. If you already have that staff and storage network in place, adding additional storage would make plenty of sense. If you don't, not so much.
Plus, in order to do it right you need to maintain a proper chain of custody and security for the video evidence that might be used in court. And given how we've seen videos mysteriously vanish in some police abuse cases, this is no trivial matter.
So no, a couple of 5 terabyte drives from newegg isn't gonna cut it, even for a small town police department.
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.
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.
Yep. I'll bet the video will help cops 9 times out of 10. BUT that 1 time in 10 is going to be very important to reforming the departments that need reform, stopping abuse, and rebuilding trust with the community.
As an aside, here in Denver we recently had a remarkable case of how self-absorbed a sociopath can be--I think the rest of the country is in for a shock as to the extent that abusive cops will not curb their behavior when being recorded...