On Wednesday, March 13, the Napa County District Attorney's Office released surveillance footage of a shooting by an American Canyon police officer in Vallejo
The sheriff’s office did not release body camera video of the shooting as the sheriff’s office said Officer Joshua Coleman’s body camera batteries died before the pursuit and he hadn’t been able to return to the charging station.
How the fuck do they not have 12 charged backup batteries and 2 chargers in every car?!?!? I mean, I know how, but what the actual fuck.
Those companies charge the taxpayers out the ass for those cameras and storage. I live in a very small town and it costs $60k/yr just for axon body and car cameras plus storage.
This logic doesn't really track because every expense that makes up their current budget is made up of many smaller expenses just like this.
Every expense has to be guarded, that's how budgets work. Each additional expense without a budgetary increase means that those expenses have to be taken out of something else.
Even if you would come up with some gopros in fancy casing, 8-9h/day of uncompressed, 1080p video that has to be hosted "in the cloud" (and transferred via 4g or the) for each and every cop adds up pretty quickly.
And don't mind that they surely find every way possible to break them, so take them as basically consumables along with the batteries and the casings...
Do you have any idea how everything cops use is expensive, because it's "for law enforcement"?
60k$/yr is negligible in a department's budget and especially for the value it adds (even with POS cops).
EDIT: the videos are most certainly compressed! But my argument is that it still remains pretty large files to upload and host.
We're talking ~10TB of video data a year per officer, for relatively high bitrate 8Mb/s video. Assuming there's a solid 10 hours a day of footage, and they're working 5 days a week.
For a small town department of say 6. That's 60TB/y.
If you use even the most expensive large storage provider (AWS S3), that's ~$19k/y in storage costs. If you use a more appropriate one for encrypted bulk storage like Backblaze, that's a measly ~$5k/y.
So, per officer. You have ~$800/y (ceilinged to be liberal with the cost) per year, compounding, for storage.
In either case you are grossly overestimating storage costs.
4G transmission costs are going to be expensive, but they shouldn't be much more expensive than the storage costs, data transfer is relatively cheap when you're paying for business services.