As police move to adopt body cameras, storage costs set to skyrocket
46 replies, posted
[url]http://www.computerworld.com/article/2979627/cloud-storage/as-police-move-to-adopt-body-cams-storage-costs-set-to-skyrocket.html[/url]
[quote=Computerworld]The police department in Birmingham, Ala. has seen a 71% drop in citizen complaints -- and a 38% drop in use of force by officers -- since deploying 319 body cameras two months ago.
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."[/quote]
Audio and video really doesn't compress and depending on how long the data's life span needs to be having an onsite PB storage appliance isn't unreasonable to think about finding in a police station
Why would we need to store it? I feel like with something like police body cams, the footage is only useful and worth keeping if there was an actual incident and the footage is needed in court. All the other hours they're recording and nothing is happening can surely be dumped.
I hope that this brings up the bytes and down the dollars when it comes to storage, even if just slightly.
[QUOTE=J Paul;48642835]Why would we need to store it? I feel like with something like police body cams, the footage is only useful and worth keeping if there was an actual incident and the footage is needed in court. All the other hours they're recording and nothing is happening can surely be dumped.[/QUOTE]
Because you can't predict what will need to be used and not, and having someone review all the cam footage isn't feasible, nor would be saying to the cops "please turn in the data only if you think something important happened".
How about the delete the massive unwarranted databases of licensplates and GPS data they've been collecting for a decade, that'd free up a few terabytes
[editline]8th September 2015[/editline]
It's actually sort of an interesting challenge since companies like Google have built their entire businesses around the assumption that storage is free, I have to wonder though on the type of storage they're using, if its all raw uncompressed data then they're just wasting tons of money, long term digital archiving of video and sound has been thoroughly studied for decades now and compression schemes can be made to greatly shrink the file size without appreciable loss in quality, these cameras aren't high rez after all nor is the microphone active at all times, its sound triggered
[QUOTE=JohnFisher89;48642863]Because you can't predict what will need to be used and not, and having someone review all the cam footage isn't feasible, nor would be saying to the cops "please turn in the data only if you think something important happened".[/QUOTE]
It wouldn't have to be like that, though. I mean, what's the protocol for dashcams? Surely they don't keep all of that footage either, right?
I would imagine you could just have someone weed through it at the end of the day. You wouldn't need to predict it, you would just have to have someone choose whether or not to archive based on the content at the end of the day. I'm sure that whatever the cost would be to employ someone to do that job would be less than the eventual cost of just archiving every second of footage they all take.
[QUOTE=J Paul;48642888]It wouldn't have to be like that, though. I mean, what's the protocol for dashcams? Surely they don't keep all of that footage either, right?
[/QUOTE]
Depends, a body cam however generally is going to be more mobile and be looking for different things in it's recordings. I'm willing to be all these body cams they are ordering are doing 720p, since unlike a dashcam where most uploads seem to be 480p and are primarily going for license plate, car description, and location(not to mention you can make the car do auto time stamping when sirens are turned on).
[quote]I would imagine you could just have someone weed through it at the end of the day. You wouldn't need to predict it, you would just have to have someone choose whether or not to archive based on the content at the end of the day. I'm sure that whatever the cost would be to employ someone to do that job would be less than the eventual cost of just archiving every second of footage they all take.[/quote]
Correct, but we are still in the early phases of implementing these camera's. It will be a few years before laws are past, and processes hammered out retention of the data.
[QUOTE=Sableye;48642870]How about the delete the massive unwarranted databases of licensplates and GPS data they've been collecting for a decade, that'd free up a few terabytes
[editline]8th September 2015[/editline]
It's actually sort of an interesting challenge since companies like Google have built their entire businesses around the assumption that storage is free, I have to wonder though on the type of storage they're using, if its all raw uncompressed data then they're just wasting tons of money, long term digital archiving of video and sound has been thoroughly studied for decades now and compression schemes can be made to greatly shrink the file size without appreciable loss in quality, these cameras aren't high rez after all nor is the microphone active at all times, its sound triggered[/QUOTE]
Because the cost of buying some more TB's of data is far far lower than getting rid of data like that. For my job a 780TB SAN came out at around 220k, buying that vs cleaning up potentially useful data and putting man hours into it is less cost effective than buying a new device and migrating to it.
we should fund police more anyways
If we're talking needing to toss stuff, why not just toss only the stuff where they're traveling to and from the station and a call where nothing interesting is happening anyway aside from radio chatter and the officer driving their vehicle? Unless it were a car chase, obviously.
[QUOTE=Fire Kracker;48642971]we should fund police more anyways[/QUOTE]
The same people who are demanding that police have body cams are also demanding that we fund police less
[QUOTE=J Paul;48642835]Why would we need to store it? I feel like with something like police body cams, the footage is only useful and worth keeping if there was an actual incident and the footage is needed in court. All the other hours they're recording and nothing is happening can surely be dumped.[/QUOTE]
Court is a minimum of 8 weeks away where I am. And that could expand all the way indefinitely depending on the case. Thats a lot of video to keep secure
We dont have cams, but I imagine that they are incident based anyway
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;48643486]If we're talking needing to toss stuff, why not just toss only the stuff where they're traveling to and from the station and a call where nothing interesting is happening anyway aside from radio chatter and the officer driving their vehicle? Unless it were a car chase, obviously.[/QUOTE]
Again, you're going to need one person for every cop to go through that footage and determine what is necessary. You're doubling the staffing needs, and that's going to be a hell of a lot more than just storage space.
[QUOTE=JohnFisher89;48642936]
Because the cost of buying some more TB's of data is far far lower than getting rid of data like that. For my job a 780TB SAN came out at around 220k, buying that vs cleaning up potentially useful data and putting man hours into it is less cost effective than buying a new device and migrating to it.[/QUOTE]
Oh no I wasn't being serious, their secret license databases are morally bad, but perfectly lawful unfortunately,
No I'm just curious as to how they are storing it because a major TV studio probably records way more video at much higher quality and has to archive that footage somehow and its got to be highly compressed, I just wonder if the best the police have is a program that downloads the footage from each can and stores it to a drive, they surely should be using some compression I just imagine they don't have nearly the technical expertise in house to optimize data space and are just dumping the footage into some program that was supplied with the cameras
What secret license databases are we talking about here...? Surely not DVS
[QUOTE=Code3Response;48643853]What secret license databases are we talking about here...? Surely not DVS[/QUOTE]
No, since 2001 many police agencies have been equipping their cars with licensplate readers that passively scan and record the plate and metadate about the plate and storing it in massive databases, if you have dozens of cars driving a 24 hours a day you can pretty much map a lot of the cars in one municipality and figure out where a car usually is at any given time, these databases and readers aren't advertised by the local police either and they often don't do a very good job securing these databases
I don't mind police driving around but making their cars into big data survalence device is just against the principles of privacy and also this data could be very handy for high end vehicle thief's who get their hands on it
[QUOTE=Sableye;48643930]these databases and readers aren't advertised by the local police either and they often don't do a very good job securing these databases[/QUOTE]
I disagree. Number plate recognition on Police cars is in no way a big secret? It's extremely well known and quite frankly if you just asked the local PD they'd probably openly acknowledge they use them.
Also, bad job at securing the databases? In what way? I haven't heard about any serious breaches associated.
[QUOTE=Sableye;48643930]No, since 2001 many police agencies have been equipping their cars with licensplate readers that passively scan and record the plate and metadate about the plate and storing it in massive databases, if you have dozens of cars driving a 24 hours a day you can pretty much map a lot of the cars in one municipality and figure out where a car usually is at any given time, these databases and readers aren't advertised by the local police either and they often don't do a very good job securing these databases
I don't mind police driving around but making their cars into big data survalence device is just against the principles of privacy and also this data could be very handy for high end vehicle thief's who get their hands on it[/QUOTE]
why would they want the database to be connected to a network, it would be much safer to have it off a network and have the data brought in to store. all encrypted too.
[QUOTE=Sableye;48643930]No, since 2001 many police agencies have been equipping their cars with licensplate readers that passively scan and record the plate and metadate about the plate and storing it in massive databases, if you have dozens of cars driving a 24 hours a day you can pretty much map a lot of the cars in one municipality and figure out where a car usually is at any given time, these databases and readers aren't advertised by the local police either and they often don't do a very good job securing these databases
I don't mind police driving around but making their cars into big data survalence device is just against the principles of privacy and also this data could be very handy for high end vehicle thief's who get their hands on it[/QUOTE]
Either your plate gets ran by hand or by machine, it doesn't make a difference. There are much more concerning matters in the world, and policing, that should be argued before anything about ALPRs.
I know nothing about technology but surely the cost is offset by the fact that police aren't using force as much as they were before and are thus killing fewer people they shouldn't be killing
I wonder if they could save money by putting together their own tape-based system, setup costs are high but per-tb is comparable to Amazon cloud storage, and probably without the overhead Taser International is sticking on them for support/handling/etc.
a TB in tape storage is like, $15. They can't argue that's expensive or a hindrance to them when they use 1.5TB in two months.
[QUOTE=J Paul;48642835]Why would we need to store it? I feel like with something like police body cams, the footage is only useful and worth keeping if there was an actual incident and the footage is needed in court. All the other hours they're recording and nothing is happening can surely be dumped.[/QUOTE]
(apologizes in advance for typos; I have a bandaged finger, makes typing awkward)
As someone who's going into the security industry, we keep notebooks and write down all the details of incidents. A prison guard one time had an inmate run up to him all panicked, asking to see the Warden immediately. The guard informed him that he was in a meeting a few hours away, and told him he'd have to organize a meeting later. The inmate ran off, and the guard thought the whole exchange as weird and noted it down.
15 years later, he got called into court. It turns out the inmate had accidentally injured another inmate while working in the kitchen, and he wanted to see the warden to tell him it was an accident (etc). 15 years later, you're not going to remember shit about 1 out of what could have been hundreds or thousands of encounters in daily routine.
That's why any kind of legal document is kept indefinitely, regardless of how insignificant it seems.
[QUOTE=latin_geek;48644201]I wonder if they could save money by putting together their own tape-based system, setup costs are high but per-tb is comparable to Amazon cloud storage, and probably without the overhead Taser International is sticking on them for support/handling/etc.
a TB in tape storage is like, $15. They can't argue that's expensive or a hindrance to them when they use 1.5TB in two months.[/QUOTE]
The $/TB is super low on tape, however the maintenance of a large tape library, maintenance, time to access data, and retrieval of said data makes it negligible. For audio and video things like VMAX and larger density disks at slower rotational speeds are almost as cost effective and can have nice features like automated offsite replication. If they are going to be doing around 1TB/mo in video storage, buying a mid-range NAS/SAN to hold say 40TB would be fairly cheap.
[QUOTE=J Paul;48642835]Why would we need to store it? I feel like with something like police body cams, the footage is only useful and worth keeping if there was an actual incident and the footage is needed in court. All the other hours they're recording and nothing is happening can surely be dumped.[/QUOTE]
you generally start recording when you arrive at an incident not just constantly. When your back at station you mark any usefull recordings as evidential, if not they get deleted after 31 days.
[QUOTE=Sableye;48643835]Oh no I wasn't being serious, their secret license databases are morally bad, but perfectly lawful unfortunately, [/QUOTE]
Why? You have no expectation of privacy in public and your car's license plate even less so. Why should I be concerned that the police might tag my plate in a parking lot? Why would they give a shit?
[QUOTE=Sableye;48643835]
No I'm just curious as to how they are storing it because a major TV studio probably records way more video at much higher quality and has to archive that footage somehow and its got to be highly compressed, I just wonder if the best the police have is a program that downloads the footage from each can and stores it to a drive, they surely should be using some compression I just imagine they don't have nearly the technical expertise in house to optimize data space and are just dumping the footage into some program that was supplied with the cameras[/QUOTE]
Different TV stations do things a little bit differently than others but in general, if it's video footage or an edit that they have to use that day or will be using for the week, they usually keep it on hard drives. For archival, they frequently use tape media, hard drives and Blu-Ray discs. If they were in a TV studio for news, the cameras they use are called EFP (electronic field production) cameras that are usually AC powered and not battery powered, where the video is fed directly to a video system in the control room. A VTR (video tape recorder) would save whatever you have on the program monitor from the video switcher. It can also record all video inputs from the video switcher as the workflow can easily switch from camera to switcher to VTR, to camera to switcher and proxy all video feeds from camera to VTR to VTR from switcher.
For cameras outside of the studio, it's called ENG (electronic news gathering) and usually has a battery pack. It's the ones used for interviewing people on location, etc. After recording, footage is usually dumped off the recording medium and into a system (described below) or edited off the recording medium if it's good enough (such as P2 cards), then sent to whatever the TV station uses, often it's the VTR or "AirSpeed" servers.
To manage all of this footage, audio, etc., TV stations like to use Avid ISIS which can handle all media storage related things. It can automatically offload your recording media onto the server, back it up and have it ready for you to edit off the network drive. [url]http://www.avid.com/US/products/family/isis[/url] TV stations have techs to deal with storage, etc.
Usually no program is supplied with the bigger cameras to handle dumping the footage, and honestly dumping the footage is as easy as copying it off the recording media onto a hard drive or somewhere. TV stations that want to archive their stuff use the AVID ISIS software because it's an industry standard that a lot of TV stations and even movie production companies use to handle their media.
For actual storage use, once again it depends on what the standards the TV station has set. Usually they set the cameras to record in the best codec and compression it can. When editing, it's usually transcoded so it's easier to use, unless the original video files don't need to be transcoded in the first place. You can of course edit without transcoding if you wanted to. Many TV stations use Avid Media Composer to handle video editing and to edit without transcoding (which means making the file easier for the computer to read and handle, at the cost of using up more storage space) would be an AMA link. When you are exporting/sending your video to a TV station, they want a specific format and everything because the play out server is picky.
Many Canadian TV channels use DNX145 for 1080i 60i, DNX means what codec and format it's using, and 145 meaning what bit rate. The amount of video recorded will vary but it can range from several TB a month. And this is for news channels. If they also showed prime time entertainment television (TV shows like The Simpsons), there's even more storage usage just for the episodes.
Source: I do TV
Or you could just store them locally in evidence lockup. Spend 30k on a storage server with a ridiculously large amount of redundant storage.
[QUOTE=GunFox;48647157]Or you could just store them locally in evidence lockup. Spend 30k on a storage server with a ridiculously large amount of redundant storage.[/QUOTE]
30k to every single police department with body cameras could get really expensive really quick, and depending on the department it may not be feasible to plop a massive server down somewhere. A massive server in every police department would be ideal, though. Keeping it secure and backing it up could be a bitch but having it right there would be far better than having it online.
I believe our police department is moving evidence/case files/video footage online in the next year or so since our server has been running out of space for the past year. May even replace the reporting software from 1999 to whatever the new service may use.
[QUOTE=GunFox;48647157]Or you could just store them locally in evidence lockup. Spend 30k on a storage server with a ridiculously large amount of redundant storage.[/QUOTE]
The redundancy has to be insane and the cost would be [i]way[/i] more than 30k.
[QUOTE=Snowmew;48648486]The redundancy has to be insane and the cost would be [i]way[/i] more than 30k.[/QUOTE]
Nah not really, you can easily get a 30-40TB NAS appliance from major vendors for around 20ish grand(even with dual SP's and raid 50). Problem is maintaining it, lot's of departments in government will usually have the city host all their data then do a chargeback program, securing that data to meet state infosec laws, and backing that data up.
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