In the post-Ferguson era of policing, precincts around the country have begun to strap cameras onto their officers, raising questions over how to store the unending stream of videos and how much it will cost.
Currently Birmingham Police officers have 319 cameras in use. The result has been a steady drop in complaints filed against the police since the cameras went into use in June.
Complaints against the department are down 72 percent compared to July, August and September of 2014. The number instances of use-of-force used by police has dropped 14 percent according to data provided by the BPD.
Still, with hundreds of hours of footage being recorded every day, the cost of storing video is proving to be more expensive than expected back in September 2014, when the
Birmingham City Council approved an agreement between the city and the body camera company Taser International. The company was hired to both deploy and implement their camera system and to provide a storage solution through Evidence.com.
The initial price tag for the camera and storage services totaled $889,093.52 over a five-year period ($238,789.52 for the first year and $162,576 per year after that). Initially the BPD signed up for a five-terabyte plan to store the videos on the Evidence.com servers provided by Taser for the first year.
To date, however, the BPD has already used up three terabytes of storage in just three months of using the cameras, according to Capt. William Brewer of the department’s Technology Division.
As it stands there is no language in current Alabama record retention laws that clarifies how long videos collected from officers in the field should be stored. Nationwide, the laws are all over the place as well, Brewer explained. The city has to find a balance between cost effectiveness and compliance with Alabama records retention laws, he said.
Brewer would not disclose exactly how much the city expects to spend on storing video, though right now he said the cost is about $1.50 per gigabyte.
“Some places they store the videos for six months,” he said. “Others have bought into the idea of permanent collection. But the amount of volume that would be just doesn’t make sense for us.
“Right now we’re already up to three terabytes. When you start looking at that and how much it will be after a year it can be quite cumbersome. Especially since we are looking to add another 300 cameras in the very near future. So we are looking at doubling that output,” Brewer said, adding that the additional cameras could be implemented in the next six months.
On their best behavior
A number of high profile cases have shone a spotlight on deaths of citizens in encounters with the police around the country. But the sudden surge in police departments deploying body cameras may be largely attributable to the events that played out for the world to see in Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson shot an unarmed Michael Brown, touching off massive prolonged protests and increased scrutiny on interactions between the police and the public.
Steve Tuttle, a spokesperson for Taser, believes that Ferguson was the breaking point. Prior to that, Taser, which was founded in 1993, began manufacturing the Axon body cameras in 2009. In early 2012 Taser’s quarterly sales were roughly $500,000 per quarter. Sales have skyrocketed $30.6 million in last quarter alone, Tuttle said.
“Just look at Ferguson,” Tuttle said. “That was a he-said-she-said case where there was not really any clear evidence. It was the people’s word against the police. It’s tragic because it resulted in a death and there is no video or audio evidence for what happened. That was a big wake up call in a powder keg situation.”
Something like that can be a game changer for a department and how they make decisions going forward, Tuttle said. “A lot of these departments saw the results of the Rialto study and naturally embraced this technology. So in 2015 we’ve just been blowing it out.”
In Rialto, California, the case study was an early experiment where Taser cameras were used in the field. The results, Tuttle said, were extraordinary. With 115 officers policing a population of about 100,000, the number of complaints filed against the police dropped 87.5 percent in the first year. The number of instances of use-of-force by the police also dropped 59 percent.
“These guys are clamoring to get access to these Axon cameras,” Tuttle said, referring to a camera with a $399 price tag. “For the services, you can go up to $89 a month for each officer. The lowest plan is about $15 a month.”
In a study done by Cambridge University, the Rialto Police Department determined that “The savings from complaint reductions alone paid for the cameras for the entire Rialto program’s cost within the first 90 days,” the study reads.
Fewer complaints saved the department $4 for every $1 spent on the cameras and the storage service, Tuttle said.
“This return on investment will grow even higher in the next phase of the study when they start to take account of the 59 percent reduction in use of force injuries, the related savings in officers being injured in those incidents, and the reductions in overtime for officers appearing in court,” according to the study.
Now 52,700 cameras are being used by roughly 3,500 police agencies in the U.S. in hopes of duplicating such results. “What you see is people start behaving better on both sides of the badge when they know they are on camera,” Tuttle said.
In the first quarter of 2015, more than 1 petabyte (equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data had been uploaded to Evidence.com cloud servers from various agencies. That is enough to store the DNA of the entire population of the US and then clone them twice, Tuttle explained.
The cloud servers should not be looked at as just storage space, Tuttle said. Officers using the cameras are able to attach meta tags to the videos as reference points, making it easier to play back the video and write a report.
“You could go back and play that video and start to put that report information in there; their name, their driver’s license number or whatever violation it was,” Tuttle said. “At the end of the shift, those tags are already in the system and you can search for them on the server by date, incident number, what type of violation. It all becomes a very manageable, searchable field to work with.”
However, not all agencies are able to afford the cloud service.
Last month, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Department received an anonymous $10,000 donation to pay for 14 new body cameras for their deputies. Bibb County Deputy Kevin Lawrence said that his department had to find an alternative to storing the videos because the cloud service was not cost effective.
“What we decided to do was buy external hard drives for all the deputies just for video storage. Our plan is to replace those hard drives when they get full and just hold onto them indefinitely,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence said they are spending roughly $50 per hard drive. He expects the 1 terabyte hard drives to hold about a year’s worth of footage from each deputy.
Is privacy a diminishing commodity?
The use of police cameras is still in its infancy in most places in the U.S. Each department is essentially responsible for deciding how long they will store videos for evidence.
Questions have been raised over the privacy of citizens who may not be expecting to be on video. Brewer said such issues are being ironed out in his department.
For instance, if the police enter a residence and capture minors on video in a compromising situation, what are the legal implications for storing that footage on a server? Brewer said that cameras will not be used in situations where there is an expectation of privacy.
“We have in our policy certain privacy measures that if we enter somewhere that a person is expecting to have privacy, like a locker room or a bathroom, unless the situation warrants it, we are not going to turn the cameras on,” Brewer said.
“The way I look at it, though, is the citizen can’t tell us we can’t bring our gun into the house. It’s the same with a camera. If they don’t want us videoing their home, they can step outside with us. Otherwise we are going to go about our business,” Brewer continued.
Brewer believes that because of technology everyone is losing some privacy. “That’s just the way it is now,” he said. So far there have not been any significant breaches of privacy in the field, he added.
The Birmingham Police Department plans to keep video on file for three years, but that is subject to change, Brewer said. Under current state law a person has two years to file a lawsuit, in which case, having access to video evidence may be crucial.
The question then becomes who has access to these videos, said David Gespass, an attorney whose focus is police misconduct and civil rights, especially in cases where minors are involved.
Taser’s service will redact information in video regarding minors or other classified information. But for police departments not using such a service, providing body cam video as evidence can be a complicated process.
“Whenever you are storing something on a cloud server, there are always chances for potential breaches,” Gespass. “This would raise serious questions with liability, especially for the company who is storing the videos. Things like that can happen.”
In places like London where there are an abundance of surveillance cameras, the average person is videoed about 300 times a day, according to a study published by the non-governmental organization, Big Brother Watch. Technology is now to a point where cameras are able to distinguish individuals with facial recognition software.
Having police implement the use of body cameras is just the beginning, Gespass said. What needs to happen now is for laws to be put in place to protect the privacy of the individual on the new frontier of surveillance.
“Expanding the public records act to make some of those videos available is something that I would certainly advocate,” Gespass said. Also, in doing so, having privacy measures in place to protect the identity of minors who may have committed a crime. “It’s not so much about the videos, but how they are accessed and who can see them.”
As for the officers in the field, Brewer said that initially, as with most technological advances, there was concern that “Big Brother is always watching.”
But Brewer said, if the officer is doing what they are supposed to, the camera will be their most powerful weapon, and, in the long run, perhaps their most expensive.
Given the likelihood that price for storing video will outpace the original allocation from the city, Brewer said, his department is working to come up with a solution for the rising costs.
“We’ve looked at using server storage that does not work with Taser. If we went with another company we could potentially do that,” Brewer said. “We’ve looked at the video we do our car videos through. They have a good solution for storing locally. It’s just something we have to look at in the future depending on our budget. We’re going to have to figure something out.”