As police move to adopt body cams, storage costs set to skyrocket
The cameras have been so effective that the department plans to buy another 300 cameras from Taser International.
"The chief's goal is to get a camera on everybody who wears a uniform," said Capt. William Brewer, who heads up Birmingham Police Department's Technology Division.
Birmingham is among a growing number of police departments that are rolling out body cameras, spurred in large part by public pressure in the wake of a series of controversial police shootings of civilians. That pressure first began to mount nationally last year in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo. Several other high-profile police shootings since Ferguson have added fuel to the body camera fire.
Even so, there's been little 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 cost about $180,000, but the department's total outlay for a five-year contract with Taser will be $889,000. That's because the pact not only includes a hardware replacement warranty, but the necessary cloud storage and file management service to deal with terabytes of content the cameras are producing.
The Birmingham police initially purchased 5TB of online storage on Evidence.com, Taser's file management cloud, which is built on Amazon's Web Service (AWS) platform. In just two months, however, the department has already used 1.5TB of its allotment -- and it's on track to exceed the 5TB limit in about six months.
"That's the biggest problem with this system...the cost of the storage," Brewer said. "They do offer unlimited storage, but it's quite costly -- well above $1 million for the package we had looked at."
Traditionally, police departments saved dash camera footage and other videos on CDs stored away in an evidence room or on an onsite server. But with the increasing use of body cameras, dashboard cams and cameras within the police department itself, the amount of video content now being generated is far more difficult to manage locally.
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 it's not the cameras that generate the most money. Glenn Mattson, who follows Taser as an equity analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann, said the company makes a far bigger profit on its storage service than hardware. Last year, Taser's gross profit margins on hardware were 15.6%; 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 even on them, it's fine, because they're going to create this high 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 rise, and compared the police video storage business to cable subscription services. While the initial cable subscription is usually a great deal, once new services are added, rates climb.
Mattson believes Taser's plan is to add features so it can become a police department's default system for every kind of digital evidence, including photos, police reports and forensics data.
The cost of data storage has forced the Birmingham Police Department to make hard decisions when it comes to deleting videos to free up space. Since Alabama records retention laws haven't caught up with video technology, police departments are left to determine their own policies.
Birmingham has come to a consensus with its district attorney on a general retention period of two years, but it's still "battling" with its own legal department.
"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 yet in dealing with this type of technology."
How long police departments store video varies widely depending on local policies. But in some cases, such as a murder investigation, the video will need to be stored forever.
Brewer said his department will likely have to extend the video retention period from two 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. So we need to realistically keep everything two-and-a-half years to give us time to be notified of an impending suit," he said. "They're always wanting that video after it's rolled off the server."
Taser, which got its start in the law-enforcement video business by affixing cameras to the company's handheld electroshock weapons, has seen brisk body camera sales. The company ships about 7,000 camera a quarter, according to Mattson. In all, about 35,000 have been shipped to date, he said.
As of the first 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 cloud storage service saw $30.6 million in sales, up 170% compared to a year ago, according to the company's earnings call.
"You can see it's growing like a hockey stick," Mattson said about Taser, which now has 26 major cities on its Evidence.com platform.
Seattle-based VieVu, which was acquired earlier this year by police and military supplier Safariland Group, was the first to introduce a police body camera. The privately-held company recently introduced its hosted evidence management service called VERIPATROL, which is based on Microsoft's Azure Government cloud platform.
The VERIPATROL evidence management service comes in three iterations: an onsite software model, a fully hosted cloud model or a hybrid of the two.
VieVu CEO Steve Ward said he doesn't know how exactly many videos have been stored to date on the VERIPATROL service. But "it's in the millions."
For example, VieVu's largest client, the Oakland, Calif. police department, has already stored one million police videos in the five years its officers have been using VieVu's body cameras.
"Over the last eight to 10 months, we've seen a dramatic shift in police agencies realizing, 'We're not IT shops. We need to make a shift to the cloud,'" Ward said.
The complexity of storing video evidence is enormous. Some videos in capital crime cases must be kept indefinitely, others, only as long as a criminal case takes to run its course, Tuttle said.
A relatively simple DUI arrest, however, could go on for months or years, depending on appeals, Tuttle added.
Gartner analyst Jeff Vining said the amount of video data that body cameras will create as their adoption escalates is "enormous."
The city of Los Angeles, for example, had initially planned to deploy 200 to 300 of Taser's body cameras for various shifts and locations. Then Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a plan to equip all 7,000 officers with body cameras.
"That caught everyone by surprise," Vining said.
L.A. police officers began strapping the Taser's palm-sized cameras on Monday.
"You've got the [Los Angeles police] IT department cringing. Do you know what that entails" Vining said. "And, of course, they don't."
Vining said the problem with the recent push for police body cameras is that the political pressure spurring their adoption has gotten ahead of evidentiary procedures and the storage technology required to support them.
The fatal shooting of Brown, an 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. in August 2014 marked a turning point. After the Ferguson shooting, trials of Taser's body cameras by police departments in major U.S. cities tripled; Taser's stock price also has more than doubled since that time.
"What [Ferguson] did for us was put a tremendous spotlight of the body camera's availability in public's knowledge," Tuttle said.
"One of the biggest things we have noticed is that our request for trial units have gone up over 75% since the Ferguson incident," said VieVu's Ward.
This week, for example, county commissioners in San Antonio approved funds for additional body cameras for sheriff's deputies. The funds were approved just hours after the release of a video that showed two deputies fatally shot a Hispanic man who appeared to have his hands up in the air.
Although the push for more body cameras is growing, several states still have laws requiring suspects to consent to being videotaped, Vining said.
And there are the associated costs, which have drawn far less attention.
"There's the enormous storage and data management cost, which is daunting," Vining added. "A records management system is a police department's Bible. If you're going to create video content, it has to be accessible to the records management system."
Just as with any physical evidence, video footage must be tracked with a chain of custody, and there are digital rights management issues that determine who can and cannot access police video. The Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) governs policies for securely storing video content.
VieVu pitches its video service as more compliant with CJIS policies because it's based on the Windows Azure Government cloud, which uses more advanced security and requires government audits.
Safariland's VieVu has distributed body cameras to some 4,000 police agencies, according to Tuttle. Scottsdale-based Taser said it's shipped 52,700 body cameras to 3,500 police departments.
Taser sells two types of cameras: The Axon Flex camera ($599) is a micro-camera that can attach to a pair of sun glasses or the visor of a police officer's cap, so as an officer's head turns, it captures what he or she sees. The camera attaches by cable to a mini-DVR that's also on the officer's body.
The Axon Body camera ($399) is a larger camera that attaches to an officer's shirt or vest and offers a wider-angle view. Both Axon cameras have a single button that a police officer can tap twice to activate them.
In default mode, the Axon cameras record at 480p resolution and can store about 8GB of content.
"Most officers record 60 to 90 minutes of video per day," Ward said. That's because officers only activate their body cameras when they believe they need to, such as during a traffic stop or when confronting a suspected criminal.
Both Taser and VieVu sell docking stations for the cameras that automatically upload video to the cloud, while also recharging the devices.
Once uploaded to either Taser or VieVu's cloud video evidence management services, police can maintain a chain of custody of those videos, search them using metadata and set retention policies for each one.
Pricing for Taser's Evidence.com cloud storage service ranges from $15 to $79 per month, per user. Taser's Officer Safety Plan, which automatically replaces old cameras every 2.5 years, costs $99 per officer per month.
VieVu sells its VERIPATROL cloud service as a bundle priced at $55 per month per officer. After purchasing an LE3 camera for $199, the VieVu Solution includes the VERIPATROL secure file management software and 60GB of storage, which can be increased for 12.5 cents per gigabyte per month). An onsite storage software bundle sells for $25 per officer per month.
While the cost for video cloud storage services may be high, studies have shown the use of police body cameras has reduced citizen complains and officer use-of-force incidents.
In 2013, a year-long study by Cambridge University of the Rialto, Calif. Police Department's use of Axon Flex cameras showed use-of-force incidents dropped by 59%, and citizen complains dropped by 87.5%. The study encompassed more than 50,000 hours of police-public interactions.
"These results carry significant implications for the future of the law enforcement profession," Rialto Police Chief Tony Farrar said in a statement at the time of the study's release.
Farrar was the principle investigator who led the study as part of his graduate degree thesis at Cambridge University.
According to Vievu, the Oakland Police Department was able to reduce use-of-force incidents by 73.8% over the five years since it deployed 619 body cameras.
While the cost and data management headaches may be significant, Birmingham's Brewer said they're all outweighed by the payback: an increase in public trust and fast incident resolution.
Body cameras not only force officers to be more careful about how they execute their duties, but once a citizen is informed they're being recorded, their behavior becomes more civil, too, he said.
Noting the recent drop in use-of-force incidents -- and citizen complaints -- Brewer said body cameras and the accompanying video storage easily achieve a return on investment.
"If it stops one or two lawsuits, it's paid for itself," he said.