Recently, there been many accounts of police brutality. Many case have been true, and others have been false claims. In both cases, the events have exploded on social media and the news. Innocent cops who were just doing their jobs are forced out because of a false claim made against them, and the officer has little clear proof that shows his innocence. Many officers now are scared to act, fearing they'll be the next big event. An easy solution to this problem is simply to provide clear evidence of what the officer was doing.
Police forces have starting issuing body cameras to officers in the field. These are small cameras that are able to be worn on their vests or uniform. They're able to record so many hours and then the video is uploaded to a server. The problem though is videos are naturally a large file. Though the quality of the video isn't the best, and that saves space, but you're still recording many hours of footage per day, per the number of officers. That adds up to a lot of footage. These videos have to go somewhere, and they have to be kept for a while, because what good does holding footage for a days do.
These servers that the video is uploaded to isn't free. Often companies offer some storage along with the purchase of cameras, but more times than other that storage isn't enough to hold a big police forces' footage for more than a few months.
Also I haven't even said anything about the cost of these cameras. Ignoring storage space, a single body camera costs about $200. In my city, we have a police force of about 100 officers. Cities like New York City has a police force of roughly 35,000 officers. These costs add up quickly for any size of departments.
Though body cameras are a great solution to the recent concerns,they're simply too expensive. It's not just the camera cost, but also the recurring fee of the servers that hold all the footage. This costs are a pain to both small and big police forces.
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