Storage space is cheap, and becoming cheaper at a exponential rate. Also, you don't need to hold onto the videos indefinitely, but rather only for a year or so, unless someone comes up with a reason why that day's video needs to be reviewed, in which case you can hold onto it longer.Zaune wrote:Doesn't really matter if it's admissible in court these days. If it finds its way to YouTube or certain media outlets... well, who was it who said that a lie could be around the world before the truth has its boots on?
Wearable cameras would probably help with this problem, so long as it was possible to turn them off in situations when they were counter-productive or just unnecessary; quite apart from the fact that being recorded whilst simply asking for directions or exchanging pleasantries in the queue for Starbucks would make most people a bit nervous, eight hours of footage of which six are shots of the patrol car's dashboard would waste a lot of storage space. A log-file recording the exact times at which they were turned off and back on would be a good compromise.
Let's assume that the camera is capable of recording with h.264, level 2.2. This is approximately 4 Mbit/s. This is sufficient for a 720x480 image, or roughly VGA. This is comparable to most current security cameras. Assuming a 12 hour shift, this would be approximately 21 GB of data. Seems unreasonably large, but you could fit that amount of data onto a decent smartphone easily. You'd most likely need to put it into 1/2 hour long chunks to read, but it's not actually a crazy amount of data nowadays. Multiply that by 1400 officers (example of a large city PD), and being on shift roughly 3 out of 6 days (common for 12 hour shift work), and you've got about 5 petabytes of data. Seems excessive? Storing the data on Amazon S3, and you're looking less than half a million dollars a month. Naturally, you'd probably not be storing the data on S3, but you're probably not looking at greater than that amount for doing it in house. You'd almost certainly be looking at paying significantly less than that.
This is also a very pessimistic estimate of the data required. You could have the camera automatically reduce frame rate when in a patrol car, for example. As for video taken while they're in the bathroom. *shrug* the camera shouldn't have the field of view to be able to view their junk. It'd likely be on their chest anyways, as a mostly anonymous bit of kit that has a lens embedded.
