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Police Body Cameras are a Small Part of the Picture

Police Body Cameras are a Small Part of the Picture

Tazer is so well known for electric stun guns that its name, like Google’s, has morphed into a verb. (Just google “tazing.”) Yet it sees its future in the growth market of body cameras, and it’s changing its name from Tazer to Axon, its proprietary brand of body camera. With its new name, the former Tazer is signaling its move to dominate the body cam market. And with the name change, it’s making a hard-to-beat offer: body cameras and data storage free for a year.

The offer of free storage, even for just a year, is significant. The enormous volume of video data collected by body cams has created a storage headache for many police departments. No one attended the police academy expecting to be a data manager, and yet that’s what many public safety administrators are becoming. Industry experts estimate 10,000 hours of body cam video are generated each week just in the big cities of America. It’s a tremendous organizational and storage chore.

Police departments recognized the value of body cams as soon as the small cameras came on the market. Realizing that media storage would be an issue for police departments, Tazer quickly began offering its customers cloud-based storage for body cam videos. Public safety budgets soon included funds for cameras, but most departments hadn’t really considered the cost of storage, which quickly ballooned as the cameras were put into the field. Tazer (now Axon) established its first-year-free program so police departments could have some budgetary breathing room to prepare for the video storage requirements.

And in any discussion of police body cams, storage is really the challenge. Writing in the Associated Press, Rick Callahan points to a number of cities whose police have had to abandon body cam programs due to storage costs. Medium-size police departments, Callahan states, have the biggest storage challenges. They have too much data to store internally, and too little to qualify for large-scale discounts from cloud-storage vendors.

Even those police departments who manage their video data on internal servers find that their physical storage needs have increased. Backup drives and high-capacity data tapes take up space, and as Federal and state governments increase the length of time that video evidence must be retained, the amount of backup media continues to grow. Best-practices recommendations call for multiple backups stored in multiple locations, adding to the overall storage challenge.

For the police agencies in the U.S. who have not yet implemented a body cam program, as well as those who may be drowning in video data, now is the time to examine storage options. Data management experts advocate storing data on a variety of media – cloud servers, drives, and tape – all of which occupy physical space. An experienced storage consultant can offer a variety of choices for managing the physical media in a cost-effective, space-efficient manner.

Even with the challenge of data storage, body cams are swiftly becoming the norm. Police and the public agree that everyone benefits from a video record of events. The picture is clear: Body cams are here to stay.

 

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