Ready or not, America's law enforcement are about to deploy body-worn video on an unprecedented scale. You may be one of these agencies. Based on a recent survey conducted jointly by the Major City Chiefs and the Major City Sheriffs, the two associations estimate that 97 percent of their members are “moving forward with body camera systems”. And camera vendor Taser told Wall Street analysts that the total addressable market for police camera systems in the U.S. (including body-worn, vehicle and interview room systems) could reach one million annual support licenses within a few years.
But are agencies large, small and in between ready for this massive deployment of a new technology that is still rapidly evolving? Do they have the necessary IT infrastructure to handle so many cameras? Do they have enough trained staff to manage so much video? Can they reconcile the sometimes conflicting demands of technology and policy? According to Darrel Stephens, Executive Director of the Major City Chiefs Association (MCC), the answers to all these questions appear to be: “not yet”.
First, consider the IT infrastructure problem. Fully 70 percent of departments responding to the chiefs and sheriffs survey do not believe that their existing infrastructure is adequate to support operational deployments of body-worn camera systems. Specific technology gaps identified by agencies include “a lack of data storage capacity, inadequate network or bandwidth capability, and inadequate wireless capacity.”
In short, there is not enough capacity to handle the massive amount of video traffic that body-worn cameras will generate. One early pioneer, Oakland Police Department, stated recently that its 600 cameras are generating 7 terabytes of data per month. But many agencies conducting pilot tests simply don’t know today how much data their cameras will generate in the future. Storage and network bandwidth requirements will vary significantly depending on when cameras are turned on and how long the video they capture is retained.
Today there is no clear national standard that local agencies can look to for guidance on storage capacity, network bandwidth or data retention. As a result, current practices are all over the map. Survey respondents indicate that their plans to retain video of evidentiary value range from 180 days to five years, suggesting the extent of uncertainty on this question. “In today’s environment”, Stephens comments, “law enforcement agencies are moving forward with BWC programs without having all the [necessary] technical and policy information in place. What stands out in this survey is the high number of ‘unknowns’.”
While IT infrastructure presents serious challenges in the short term, experience suggests that the costs of data transmission and storage will continue to decline and will eventually become manageable. A more serious long-term problem facing departments may be how to pay for the additional people needed to actually use body cam video and comply with the many policy requirements that will accompany it.
One thing you can do is train staff to tag and categorize body-worn video, review it for training and evidentiary purposes, and transmit it to other agencies or specialized internal units. Among those that survey respondents expect to share video with: Police Internal Affairs (75 percent), District Attorney (70 percent), City Attorney (45 percent), and other entities such as Police Complaint Office (13 percent).
Above all, departments will have to review and in many cases redact videos prior to release in response to potentially large numbers Freedom of Information requests. Seventy-two percent of agencies say they are subject to FOIA requests, and of those the overwhelming majority (78 percent) say they will redact videos before FOIA release (another 18 percent “don’t know”). Reviewing and redacting thousands of hours of video – some of it very difficult to interpret – will require significant staff resources that are not currently budgeted for in most agencies.
What happens if a lack of sufficient funding or staffing prevents agencies from complying with their FOIA obligations? The survey results point to an emerging conflict between the resource burdens of handling body-worn video and the needs of policy compliance. Here again it is possible that advances in technology will come to the rescue. Some vendors have recently begun offering automatic redaction software for body-worn video. Applying principles of machine learning, the software (which typically resides in a vendor’s cloud) can automatically blur or completely obscure sensitive areas of video images, such as human faces or even small details like officer badge numbers. But the deployment of such software is still in the early stages and few agencies have significant experience with it yet.
Integration of body-worn video with existing data and IT assets such as Record Management Systems (RMS) and Computer-aided Dispatch (CAD) is another major concern. “The value of BWCs for the entire public safety community goes beyond simple evidentiary and behavior assessment purposes,” Stephens observes. “The ability to integrate BWC video, audio and GPS data with applications and devices will enhance emergency communications and real-time incident management and present a clearer and more complete understanding of each incident.”
RMS, CAD and BWC vendors are only beginning what promises to be a long and arduous process of software and hardware integration. Today many agencies simply don’t know how data will be integrated across multiple existing RMS and CAD platforms. In the words of the survey report, “The ability to integrate this new sophisticated equipment into the emergency communication architecture and to leverage its full potential is challenging.”
The final and perhaps most important concern for agencies moving to body-worn video is data security and confidentiality. “Protecting the data and preserving the chain of custody should always be a primary consideration,” says MCC’s Stephens. Given that much or perhaps most body-worn video will be stored and managed off-site by third party cloud vendors, the question of how to make sure that video is not accidentally or deliberately leaked becomes urgent.
While media coverage of body cameras tends to focus on a small number of controversial use of force incidents, the vast majority of BWC footage will not involve the discharge of firearms. The reality of everyday policing is quite different than media headlines would have us believe. Body-worn cameras will soon be capturing tens of thousands of hours of video every year that contain sensitive scenes of crime or accident victims in distress, as well as images of suspects, witnesses, mentally handicapped persons and innocent bystanders. Ensuring that strong safeguards are in place to protect the privacy rights of these individuals will be a critical operational concern for agencies.
One solution that has been recommended by the IACP to address body-worn video data protection is to adopt the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy or CSP. The CSP is a careful and thorough checklist of the technical and organizational measures that agencies must take to protect such data. Almost every law enforcement agency in America uses it on a daily basis when accessing state or Federal databases that store criminal history records, fingerprints, mug shots and similar confidential data.
Body-worn video gathered by state and local agencies does not fall under the purview of the FBI and is generally not defined as Criminal Justice Information in the strict sense of state and Federal statutes. However, the CSP has evolved over the years into a de facto standard and best practice for users of sensitive law enforcement data. According to [name & title withheld pending approval] of the FBI’s CJIS Division, state and local agencies would do well to adopt the CSP as a baseline standard for protecting body-worn video.
Jeff Could is the President of SafeGov Inc. Gould has more than 20 years experience in technology publishing and IT market research.
