As police motility to adopt trunk cams, storage costs fix to skyrocket

Petabytes of law video are flooding into cloud services

Senior Reporter, Computerworld |

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REUTERS/Al Seib/Pool

The police department in Birmingham, Ala. has seen a 71% drop in denizen complaints -- and a 38% drib in use of strength by officers -- since deploying 319 body cameras ii months ago.

The cameras have been so effective that the section plans to buy another 300 cameras from Taser International.

"The chief'due south goal is to get a camera on everybody who wears a compatible," said Capt. William Brewer, who heads up Birmingham Police force Department'due south Technology Division.

Birmingham is among a growing number of police departments that are rolling out torso cameras, spurred in big part by public pressure in the wake of a series of controversial police force shootings of civilians. That pressure start began to mount nationally last yr in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brownish, in Ferguson, Mo. Several other high-profile police shootings since Ferguson accept added fuel to the body camera fire.

Still, there's been piddling focus on the larger ecosystem needed to make the cameras useful, including potentially high storage costs -- petabytes of video are now being uploaded annually -- and file management concerns.

In Birmingham, for instance, the the video cameras themselves toll about $180,000, but the department'south total outlay for a five-year contract with Taser will be $889,000. That'southward because the pact not but includes a hardware replacement warranty, but the necessary cloud storage and file management service to bargain with terabytes of content the cameras are producing.

The Birmingham police initially purchased 5TB of online storage on Prove.com, Taser's file direction cloud, which is built on Amazon's Web Service (AWS) platform. In only 2 months, however, the department has already used 1.5TB of its allocation -- and it's on rail to exceed the 5TB limit in near half-dozen months.

"That's the biggest problem with this system...the cost of the storage," Brewer said. "They do offer unlimited storage, but information technology'southward quite costly -- well above $one one thousand thousand for the package nosotros had looked at."

Traditionally, police departments saved nuance camera footage and other videos on CDs stored abroad in an evidence room or on an onsite server. Simply with the increasing use of  body cameras, dashboard cams and cameras within the police department itself, the amount of video content at present being generated is far more than hard to manage locally.

The cameras are merely the offset

Body cameras are the fastest growing segment of the police video camera business organization. The two largest police body camera manufacturers today -- Taser and VieVu -- say they've shipped devices to 41% of the nation's eighteen,000 police departments.

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VieVu's LE3 body camera mounts to an officer's vest or shirt.

But it's not the cameras that generate the most money. Glenn Mattson, who follows Taser equally an disinterestedness analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann, said the company makes a far bigger turn a profit on its storage service than hardware. Last year, Taser'due south gross profit margins on hardware were fifteen.vi%; the gross margins for video storage were 51%, Mattson said.

"There's no contest. They don't care about making money on the cameras," Mattson said. "If they can just break fifty-fifty on them, it's fine, considering they're going to create this loftier margin stream of revenue on the video side."

Mattson believes that, on average, police departments pay Taser from $25 to $30 per officer per month right now. But he expects that to ascent, and compared the police video storage concern to cable subscription services. While the initial cablevision subscription is usually a great deal, once new services are added, rates climb.

Mattson believes Taser's plan is to add features so information technology tin can go a police force department's default system for every kind of digital evidence, including photos, police reports and forensics information.

The price of data storage has forced the Birmingham Police force Section to make hard decisions when it comes to deleting videos to free up infinite. Since Alabama records retentivity laws haven't defenseless up with video engineering science, police force departments are left to determine their ain policies.

screen shot 2015 08 31 at 4.02.05 pm Taser International

Taser'south two camera models, the Axon Body, a self-independent unit worn on a vest or shirt, and the Axon Flex, which can be affixed to an officers cap or spectacles.

Birmingham has come to a consensus with its commune attorney on a general retention menstruum of two years, but it's yet "battling" with its own legal section.

"We're still trying to make sure we don't delete them in violation of Alabama records retention laws," Brewer said. "Unfortunately, our state, along with probably many other states, has not caught up nevertheless in dealing with this type of technology."

How long police force departments store video varies widely depending on local policies. But in some cases, such as a murder investigation, the video volition demand to be stored forever.

Brewer said his department will likely have to extend the video retention period from 2 to two-and-a-half years, not because of criminal investigations, but because of lawsuits and civil litigation.

"In our state, [citizens] have up to two years to file a lawsuit. And then nosotros need to realistically keep everything two-and-a-half years to give us fourth dimension to be notified of an impending suit," he said. "They're always wanting that video after it's rolled off the server."

A sales nautical chart 'like a hockey stick'

Taser, which got its start in the law-enforcement video business by affixing cameras to the company'southward handheld electroshock weapons, has seen brisk body camera sales. The company ships about 7,000 camera a quarter, according to Mattson. In all, virtually 35,000 take been shipped to engagement, he said.

As of the start quarter of this year, more than a petabyte (one million gigabytes) of police video has been uploaded to Taser's Evidence.com service, according to Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle.

"A video is uploaded every 2.9 seconds," Tuttle said.

In the second quarter of this year, Taser's Axon camera and Evidence.com deject storage service saw $30.6 one thousand thousand in sales, upwardly 170% compared to a yr ago, co-ordinate to the company'southward earnings call.

"You can see it's growing like a hockey stick," Mattson said about Taser, which now  has 26 major cities on its Testify.com platform.

Seattle-based VieVu, which was acquired earlier this year by police and military supplier Safariland Group, was the first to introduce a law body camera. The privately-held company recently introduced its hosted show management service called VERIPATROL, which is based on Microsoft'due south Azure Authorities deject platform.

The VERIPATROL evidence management service comes in three iterations: an onsite software model, a fully hosted cloud model or a hybrid of the 2.

VieVu CEO Steve Ward said he doesn't know how exactly many videos accept been stored to engagement on the VERIPATROL service. Just "it's in the millions."

For case, VieVu'south largest client, the Oakland, Calif. police section, has already stored one million police videos in the five years its officers have been using VieVu'southward trunk cameras.

"Over the last eight to 10 months, we've seen a dramatic shift in law agencies realizing, 'We're not Information technology shops. Nosotros need to make a shift to the deject,'" Ward said.