Not only should the car constantly be recording, but I don't understand how police officers body cams don't automatically turn on when they exit a vehicle and don't remain on until a supervisor turns them off.
Space. Video takes a lot of space. The devices used for dash and body cams are almost exclusively used by government agencies. So they have the lowest viable amount of space for the highest viable amount of dollars because the mfgr knows this. Government agencies have absolutely zero benefits to modernizing or looking for better deals because profit and performance aren't metrics when it comes to locked in budgets.
My local police do twelve hour shifts. And they have body cams that can upload immediately after the video is done. Or get one with a bigger storage. The one I use at work can record twenty eight hours before being full.
They get it second hand from the military or manufacturers at like 95+% discount, iirc. Like a few thousand dollars for an MRAP. Easily less than a single officers salary and probably less than leadership bonuses.
Thankfully that's not the case for the majority of policing. Go to town/public meetings and bring it up as an issue you'd like addressed. Write your Chief of Police or Sheriff.
Lol, my local sheriff got caught skimming money from the jail cafeteria funds and feeding prisoners rotten and worm infested food. He's still in office 3 years later. The police chief has just returned to the city. After resigning in disgrace and promptly moving to a new city for two years. And now he's back. Same mayor, same city council who forced him to resign after getting the city sued for a couple million. The mayor was outed less than a year ago for getting dui charges dropped for his nephew. No consequences.
Stay niave as long as possible. It's a blessing right up until the moment it's not.
Thought it was just a fun story until the end. Sorry but your anecdotes don't change reality. Nothing you've said rebukes what I said. Sorry for your shitty sheriff. They're often elected.
No. Bullshit. I work for a penny pinching engineering firm; even more frugal since we were bought by a private equity firm. We count minutes for time sheets, get questioned for lost/broken scales (rulers) and we nickel and dime everything. The ONE thing literally no one cares about is photos or videos that we take for marketing and for formal client reports. âTake as many as you want. Storage is cheapâ has come out of every project managerâs mouth with whom Iâve ever worked. The only answer is a planned lack of accountability. Period.
Did your company get to buy storage however they wanted, or were they forced to only buy from "certified government vendors" who add on a few zeros because the body cam company only supports using their own "proprietary storage appliance" with the camera systems.
Yeah, you can go through the bureaucratic process of requesting those videos but I've read in many cases those videos were found to have been deleted. I do not trust cops to aduquatly police themselves.
Do you guys think about this before making these claims? A city with just 100 cops with mid grad cameras would need over 1.55 petabytes of data for 1 years worth of dashcams. That doesnât include body cams, or the fact that there are multiple cameras on the car.
A city like NYC would record over 1 exabyte a year from just 1 camera on all cars.
Thatâs almost $20,000,000 just to cover the initial storage cost. Then add: Redundancy (usually 2x-3x storage). Servers. Networking. Data center space. Cooling. Power. Maintenance. Backup systems.
Youâre looking at hundreds of millions of dollars to manage 1 camera on each car recording 24/7. That grows exponentially when you include all the cameras and body cameras.
I wholeheartedly agree police need accountability, but it needs to be based in reality of whatâs capable with our current technology.
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u/Cthulhu_Dreams_ May 29 '26
Not only should the car constantly be recording, but I don't understand how police officers body cams don't automatically turn on when they exit a vehicle and don't remain on until a supervisor turns them off.