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Comment by ddlatham | Hacker News Reader

Besides the overall result, another fact that surprised me:

The devices vary in price, but the biggest expense is the data-storage cost. In Washington, M.P.D. officers collect about a thousand hours of footage a day. About 40 percent of it is deleted within 90 days, while the rest is to be kept for months, years or decades, depending on the statute of limitations for the charges connected to the footage.

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Having worked with law enforcement I can expand on this - car dash cam footage takes an impressive amount of storage as well. Given how the cameras are triggered, sometimes the footage is not needed or useful and therefore can be deleted. In other instances, depending on case charges and footage, the video has to be kept until further notice - the word 'indefinitely' is rarely used but that is the implication. Of course the body cams adds to this.

This sounds like a good use case for cold storage like AWS glacier. If you assume 1000 hours of footage would be ~600GB, 1 day of footage would cost ~2.4 cents per month on glacier until you go to retrieve it. Or, 75 cents per month for each month of footage. Most footage would never be watched and eventually purged.

I'm not sure how chain of custody would work...perhaps digitally signing the uploads and keeping those signature records locally at the station. But the USG uses AWS, so I'm sure some solution could be found.

It does sound like a good use case for that, and it is, but you're thinking like a Silicon Valley engineer type, not like a company that sells products to the government: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-...

Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is obscene.

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