Urbana PD Body Cams

Urbana will be joining other local law enforcement agencies in implementing body cameras for the whole department. From the News-Gazette last week:

Urbana police set to buy body cams
The Urbana Police Department is about to become the fifth Champaign County agency to use body cameras.

Lt. Joel Sanders said Thursday that the department has purchased an integrated video recording system that, in addition to body cameras, includes squad car and interview room surveillance cameras.

The cost of the system — which includes 14 squad car cameras, 60 body-worn cameras, two interview room cameras, a server, software and other support items — was about $220,000 and was largely paid for using funds already budgeted for the replacement of squad car cameras...

Sanders said the new system will be put into use incrementally. One officer with a body camera and his squad are already outfitted and on the street...

Officers will receive training on the body-worn cameras over the next several weeks. As the new squad cars hit the streets, uniformed officers assigned to those cars will begin using the bodyworn cameras.

Full article available in the eEdition here. A News-Gazette article a couple years ago highlighted the upfront and ongoing costs of such a system for local departments. The article looks at Champaign and Urbana, but this excerpt about Mahomet had a helpful summary of the complications:

For Mahomet Police Chief Mike Metzler, the issue isn't the cost of the cameras themselves.

"The real cost for us comes in the management of the video itself," he said.

Mahomet continues to grow — it has added more than 1,000 residents since the last official census, in 2010, put its population in 7,258 — but it's not Champaign. Or Urbana, for that matter.

Last week, its police force returned to full strength by adding a ninth member. Finding the time for one of them to handle video isn't practical, Metzler said.

And storage involves more than simply ensuring that all footage is safely kept on a server for 90 days, the chief added.

It's flagging certain sequences for various purposes, copying or transferring footage to prosecutors for evidence, even redacting faces of innocent bystanders in video that can be the subject of Freedom of Information requests.

"Being able to edit, redact and copy and store that video is a huge issue for us, and the state of Illinois — with recent changes in law — has made it even more difficult," Metzler said.

Full article here. The City of Champaign's IT department recently explained their data storage expansion on digital imagery as "exponential." Much of that is due to requirements for police body cam data storage, even at current low resolutions. Increasing the number of cameras or increasing their resolution to high resolution could immediately quadruple storage space needs. Their five year estimate for data storage was full up in roughly two years. Issues with encryption, constant cyber attacks, generators and offsite backup infrastructure all multiply with more cameras and higher resolution.