Womb_Raider

Yeah just look at my post breaking down the costs... that's just disgusting mismanagement of funds, especially if the state already has some form of data storage center available.

Lawsuit for misappropriation of funds incoming.

Womb_Raider

This is hilarious: The article complains about the cost over a few years costing 1M, but the cameras were just 200 grand. That means they're paying 800K for storage. Do you fucking realize how much 800K can get you? I got 8TB for 300 bucks. It requires 5TB/month. That means a year would be less than 60TB for a year - just under 8 of the 8TB units I bought - which would cost just $2,400.

Can someone explain to me where my math is wrong or are they wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars? The article even says plainly "they don't intend to make their money off of the cameras, but from the data storage". Who owns that company, anyway? Something doesn't add up to me.

NateThomas1979

It's not just a matter of cost of the units but of power to those units, etc.

They aren't storing the video themselves but paying for a service to store it.

Womb_Raider

So you're saying they have like a $750,000 power bill? This is a single state's police we're talking about, not the entire US... 5TB in an entire month isn't shit.

I want to know who owns this company and what he did to get such a cushy deal on tax payer money, and I'm going to do what I can to file a civil suit if I can't find a good explanation.

NateThomas1979

I would think that there might be other requirements that the state needed such as security etc.

But again, I'm suspecting that they haven't considered my proposal above. I could easily see continued storage costing exponentially vs. using the cloud as a temp storage while they determine what is necessary to keep and what isn't.

Womb_Raider

I think your post is the right answer, but I still don't think you should be making excuses for that laughable price. We're talking about $800,000 to store video files. Let me use amazon for 5 seconds and show you why this is dumb.

Western Digital has a 4tb HDD listed for just $140.

$800,000/$140 = 5714 Hard Drives.

5,714 x 4 = 22856TB

Now, we take this massive number, and divide it by the tiny 5TB per month they claim to need.

22,856/5 = 4,571.

They could run that program for four thousand months if you don't consider electrical costs and physical space/property for storage.

Do you still think the math seems fair to you? IF so, why?

Edit: changed listen to listed, derp.

NateThomas1979

I'm not making excuses, I hope it doesn't seem that way. I'm saying that they might not be as technologically advanced and therefore they might be being taken advantage of since they outsourced it.

NateThomas1979

Well DUH.

Ok, to anyone who might have any ability to help affect change in the way the police handle body camera storage space... here's a simple fix that WORKS.

Quit thinking in terms of storing everything.

At the present time, simply storing all video forever is not a viable choice.

Instead, storing video for a limited amount of time is the only viable option until data storage and technology is advanced enough to make it affordable.

All officer video is stored for X number of days according to budgetary abilities. After such a period of time, any video that is not under review is deleted and that space is used for new video storage. All questionable video is recorded to external storage such as a USB or CD-ROM and stored in the evidence area.

This creates a 'reservoir' of video storage and allows for actual questionable responses to be stored permanently.

Let's be honest too, if someone has committed any questionable action as a police officer, people don't wait weeks and months, they are complaining to the precinct within days. It shouldn't be hard to flag those timestamps while allowing for other mundane activities such as sitting in the squad car to be deleted and use that extra space for new storage.

jerry

Most American stores (mainly the superstores and grocery stores) keep their surveillance tapes on a 1 month backup at most, then it cycles out for the next month. With officers cameras and so many of them, a week or 2 weeks should be sufficient

NateThomas1979

I would say 2-3 weeks would be a minimum since sometimes even though you complain it might take a bit for it to get through the system and you don't want to lose valuable evidence. But definitely along the same lines as the store video model.