[davidf560]

> Why not buffer 5 hours by default?

Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues.

Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.

[pessimizer]

> Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.

Does it though? The source of all your objections here is that if body cameras had a 5 hour buffer, it's vitally important that buffer be saved even if nothing important happened. It's fine if you think that's true, but your alternative is to throw out all footage after a 30-second buffer unless an officer decides that they are in an important situation, implying that the footage missed is not important at all.

How about not offloading 5 hours of video if nothing happened? That's not somehow less honorable or ethical than never recording the video at all when you know, from endless examples, that the camera will often not be turned on in critical situations.

[ethbr0]

Hypothetically, all footage from an officer, when they're on-shift, could be of interest. And it's probably fair to say that state / the public have a right to that information for some purposes.

In the interest of sanity, I think we can suspend recording for personal moments: - Bathroom - Medical - Break time (e.g. eating)

We can potentially switch to a lower-resolution / audio-only take for the vast majority of a shift. E.g. idling in a cruiser.

As someone else highlighted, what we absolutely want to record is: - Use of weapon (holster switch) - Conflict (volume trigger?) - Immediately preceding interval before camera turned off (presumably, will contain a request / rationale to disable)

Effectively, what we want to do is switch from a trigger-on to a trigger-off. Cops shouldn't have to even think about cameras. They should just work.

[michaelt]

Given that trucking companies routinely use dashcams with 12+ hours of continuous recording, and loads of shops routinely store days of CCTV from loads of cameras, I'm not sure I agree with your arguments that always-on bodycams aren't technically feasible.

[akira2501]

> Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded.

Then make the recordings encrypted, and ONLY let the DA have the key that decrypts them. This solves the lack of data problem, but it also prevents the police from using their own footage without authorization.

> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day.

You don't have to save full quality video indefinitely. After several days, remove all color from the video. After several more, reduce the frame rate. After several more, reduce the resolution. If you built your system carefully, you could save much more video than people tend to estimate.

Beyond that.. there is a statue of limitations. I expect the police to keep their body cam recordings for up to 90 days, beyond that, unless they're directly related to a case, they should be allowed to reclaim that storage.

[superfrank]

> Then make the recordings encrypted, and ONLY let the DA have the key that decrypts them. This solves the lack of data problem, but it also prevents the police from using their own footage without authorization.

Unfortunately, That doesn't work.

Police officers, supervisors, and internal affairs often need to refer back to recording when making or reviewing police reports. Body cam and dash cam videos often need to be shared internally or externally. Also, many precincts take random samples of body camera footage and do spot check reviews to make sure officers are behaving in line with policy.

There are tons of people who need access to body cam footage on a regular basis.

[billh]

I've been saying this for a while now and I think encryption is the solution to the problem.

Instead of having an "Off" button, make the button begin ciphering the data with an officers private key. If the courts discover that there is something of interest in the duration of time that the camera is encrypting, they can compel the officer to turn over her encryption key or face a contempt charge.

This would allow either side (prosecution or defendant) to bring an argument forward and to have a judge decide if there's enough merit to warrant a decryption of the recording.

[Buttons840]

> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD

40,000 officers (rounded up)

8 hours of full HD video can be stored in 10 gigs of storage

do this 365 days a year for every officer

S3 standard costs less than 3 cents per gigabyte to store per month

result: about 50 million dollars to store 8 hours of FHD video of every officer every day for a year

The NYPD anual budget is 5 billion dollars. Thus, storing all this video would cost about 1% of the budget. I've made generous roundings in favor of overestimating this cost, and in reality it would be much less.

[davidf560]

Now calculate how big of a data pipe you need to AWS to upload 400 terabytes of video each day and how much does that cost?

[Buttons840]

I'm not proposing you store it on S3, but I used the price of S3 standard as a cost estimate. In reality I expect you could get the cost to be much less (I mean, even S3 standard is closer to 2 cents than the 3 cents I quoted) with on-premises storage. You also wouldn't need every minute of every video instantly available like you would get with S3 standard, further reducing costs.

I had a hard time finding the bandwidth costs, but since you've done the math already, I'd like to hear what you came up with.

[henryfjordan]

AWS has hard drives that they can send you empty and you fill em up and send them back for upload to S3. They even have semi trucks full of hard drives that will drive to you: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

[heavyset_go]

If you were storing large amounts of data on a budget, you'd be wasting a considerable amount of money on storage and bandwidth with S3.

[kbenson]

> a victim who has asked not to be recorded

That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.

> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.

It's a lot, but it's really just a matter of funding. If there's money to be paid for the service that someone can make a profit on, someone will step in to offer that service. I think the amount of storage required is actually pretty close to the amount Youtube adds in content every day (if we assume not all of the 800k police officers are recording every day, and not all of them are out on the street with a need to record). That's a lot, but the requirements aren't quite the same (you could start at high quality and re-encode to lower quality at age intervals unless flagged as important) instead of encoding to many qualities initially. Additionally there wouldn't need to be nearly as much serving infrastructure as youtube. It's the sort of problem the Federal government could throw a couple billion at a year that went to departments through grants and we would pretty quickly have a competitive field of companies offering storage for this as a service. Managing the security of the data would definitely need some regulation though.

[davidf560]

> That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.

If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this are, but as I understand it people have that right. That may not apply out in public but it seems to in private homes at least.

[kbenson]

There are laws in some states about parties consenting to be recorded, I'm not sure how that interacts with the police and their recording, but my guess is that it's mostly untested until it hits a court or if specific exemptions exist or were added.

I understand and agree with people's need and right for privacy (although I'm not quite sure how the right interacts with this depending on who starts the interaction), but I think if HIPAA like stringency requirements were enacted on the data, with severe penalties, we could possibly hit a sweet spot where people had an expectation that their interaction videos would be private, and yet we could still rely on active monitoring by video of what those we've enabled with extra rights and abilities for the purpose of protecting us actually do, as a form of oversight.

[amf12]

> Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded

Easily solvable. At a single press of a button they can temporarily turn off the camera for 15 minutes at a time. At a double press it is turned off for 30 minutes.

Now if a cop says the camera was turned off while doing official business, it was turned off on purpose and they no longer have an "excuse" that they forgot to turn it on.

[gruez]

>Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues.

If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds.

>I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.

Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.

[davidf560]

> If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds.

Once you've recorded that video it's subject to FOIA requests and rules of evidence and all kinds of things like that. If your recording only includes the past minute or 2, you can be reasonably sure it doesn't include something it shouldn't (such as a victim who asked not to be recorded from an hour ago). If hitting that button commits a 5 hour buffer, then you're going to have all kinds of stuff now "in the public record" that maybe shouldn't be there. But also you now have 5 hours of more or less useless video that you have to store and account for (which costs $).

> Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.

It's actually less about the storage and more about the bandwidth to transfer that data to the storage location. Though the cost of the storage itself can still be an issue even if you're only retaining it for 90-180 days.

There's a whole bunch of factors of course, but pick a reasonable bit rate (5-10 Mbps perhaps) for your recording and multiply it by the number of hours recorded per officer and the number of officers in an agency. Chicago PD has 12,000 police officers. I don't know how many of them work on a given day but let's say 10,000. Say each one records 5 hours per day based on the 5 hour buffer proposed here.

10,000 * 5 hours = 50,000 hours of footage per day

50,000 hours * 5 Mbps = 112.5 terabytes per day

112.5 terabytes uploaded in 24 hours = 10.4 Gbps

(you need to be able to upload a full day's recording within 24 hours or you'll never catch up)

Doing this quickly so hopefully my math isn't off but it's in line with what I remember. 10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud. 20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.

Sure, you can attack some of these numbers (not every officer will have a recordable interaction every day etc.) but I hope it gets the point across.

[gruez]

>10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud

that might seem a lot if there's only one server, but it's really not that much considering that it's going to be uploaded from multiple precincts. Wikipedia says there are 21 "districts", so that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution.

>20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.

If it's being stored using aws glacier deep archive, that's only $20k/month. That's probably a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the costs associated with running such a service.

[davidf560]

> that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution

We're talking 500 Mb/s of upload 24/7 though, which can't be used for anything else (i.e. you need capacity beyond that for any other internet traffic). I doubt a regular old 1Gbps business class connection will cut it there (I'm sure they'd shut you off after a few days of uploading like that).

Despite another post that cited a large budget for NYPD, most agencies are cash-strapped. Telling them they need a $thousands/month internet connection at every precinct isn't going to go over well.

I've been to several PDs (think suburban city - probably like the majority of agencies) where their entire "internet infrastructure" consisted of a Comcast cable modem screwed to a sheet of plywood on a wall. Like I said elsewhere, most PDs are the opposite of high-tech - compared to most companies, their employees don't spend nearly as much time on computers or the internet.

[dillondoyle]

Reverse it and add penalties & an assumption of adding reasonable doubt. E.g. cop can press button before going piss. Press it again to turn it back on.

But if they pull someone over, press the stop button that either has penalty or minimally should have mandatory 'shadow of a doubt' implications

Storage is so cheap I believe it's silly we don't have this. And top down to force local muni's who's citizens support police violence and biased over policing.

But unfortunately it doesn't even matter yet there are so many police who have clearly committed crimes/murder/manslaughter that was caught on camera without large/any consequences

[bigbubba]

Finally, a true use case for 5G.