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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.