Spokane police spend approximately $320,000 on body camera storage per year | Hacker News Reader

Spokane police spend approximately $320,000 on body camera storage per year

krem.com

17 pointsthomasjudge14 comments

Is that too much? How much is it worth to us to have at least a chance at oversight for peace officers? I think if it saves one life, it's worth it.

The product they seem to be using is Axon enterprises “Evidence.com” which details some features here: https://www.axon.com/products/evidence

I think that there is some potential for oversight, but I don’t see any clear language denoting citizen access or FOIA compliance. What I do see is tools for metadata tagging and procecutorial access.

What concerns me is that these huge centralized services will grow to be something akin to license plate scanners, but for faces and with the ability to walk around and into private spaces.

That doesn't sound that outrageous. AWS S3 would come to close to $50k/yr for that amount of data and presumably this body camera footage storage company provides some additional value beyond just raw data storage that is encapsulated in that cost.

An extra $270k in additional value?

Video transcoding and a UI to scan through, categorize, tag, etc. sounds pretty valuable.

Who knows - it might integrate with case tracking software and do speech to text and semantic search etc.

I would assume that high availability and cloud accessibility are directly opposed to the requirements of the use case, though.

Store-once, read pretty-much-never should drive the price down by a large factor.

But for the use case you'd use glacier, not S3.

Spokane’s history of recent, overt racism and brutality from its police force earned them need for such an expense. Otto Zhem, racial profiling, and a cover up culture essentially mandated the body cameras.

The video is landing in Azure storage. I’m sure Evidence.com is making a good margin on the service. They were offering free body cameras to police forces, in the old razor/blade model.

Why not use Google Drive ? It offers unlimited storage for businesses.

Unlimited doesn’t mean what you think it does.

It’s unlimited until you abuse it in most cases

What do you think storing PBs of video for an entire police department is?

Doesn't seem so bad...it provides a lot more than "dumb storage" for $89 a month.

https://axon.cdn.prismic.io/axon%2F4f80e99a-b5d6-414e-bcd8-d...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com