Good.
City Council voted Wednesday to spend $1 million to buy servers and other equipment to store video collected by city police officers equipped with body cameras.
The vote, passed with relatively little fuss following months of sometimes-contentious public debate, marks the next step in the Houston Police Department’s ongoing effort to equip more than 4,000 patrol officers with the devices.
The storage will cost the city about $8 million over five years, with about $585,000 more per year in additional staffing costs, officials said. An alternate proposal to use cloud-based storage would have cost the city even more.
[…]
The city plans to purchase 4,500 body cameras, of which about 400 would be spares. Wednesday’s vote cleared the way for the city to purchase Dell Compellent computer servers with space to hold 1.5 petabytes of data, and a similar amount of space to hold a duplicate copy of the data.
One copy would be stored in HPD’s data center, with a separate copy stored in the city’s Disaster Recovery Center, according to the police department.
The move to store the data in-house had prompted worries from some that the data could be more easily tampered with, a concern Mayor Sylvester Turner brushed aside in brief remarks after the meeting.
“I’m comfortable the integrity of the system is sound,” he said.
See here and here for some background. I’m a little surprised that a cloud solution was more expensive, but no big deal. A petabyte, by the way, is one step up from a terabyte, which is one step up from a gigabyte. If your PC has 500 GB of hard disk space, then 1.5 petabytes is like 3000 of your hard drives. So yeah, a lot of storage space.
The city wasn’t the only entity taking action on body cameras. From the inbox:
In a move to strengthen service, the METRO Board unanimously approved issuing body cameras to METRO police (MPD) officers as part of their regular uniforms.
“Our officers are excited about this. We see this as an enhancement not only for our officers but for our employees and patrons,” said MPD Chief Vera Bumpers.
The $184,125.00 contract with Watch Guard covering the purchase and implementation of the 195 cameras, will provide new surveillance capability for security purposes. Each camera costs $699.00, and all officers as well as sergeants will all wear the units.
“We are pleased to take this step. We expect this program to enhance our police department from a investigative and training perspective as well as strengthen community trust in law enforcement with increased transparency and accountability,” said Board Chair Carrin Patman.
Anticipated delivery and roll-out of the new security program is projected to take six months.
Camera data is planned for storage on MPD’s video management system for 90 days unless it is classified as evidence. Storage of the video data will require the purchase of additional hardware with an estimated cost of $253,015. The METRO Board has not yet approved that expenditure.
Good for Metro. I hadn’t been aware before now that they had been working on getting body cameras for their 191 officers. We should remember that there are a whole lot of law enforcement agencies in Texas, and the more of them that equip their officers with body cameras, the better off we’ll all be. The school districts, community college districts, universities like Rice and UH and TSU, and the many small cities in the area should all have plans of some kind to get on board with this. Don’t be the last holdout.
Any cost estimates are going to be wild guesses if the past is an indication, very few projects coming in at or under budget in recent memory. And I wonder if the end costs are as cheap as the state proposal that has been bandied about of late or what bells and whistles get tossed in the mix to make direct comparisons impossible.
Lastly, I’m not sure which party to all this was suggesting Houston has anything close to “4000 patrol officers” but the real number comes closer to half that per the city website, budget records, and various other official releases. As best I can tell, they have about 4000 employees on paper of the officer rank but thousands are assigned to various divisions or administrative tasks unrelated to patrol functions.