St. Anthony police had both body cams turned off in a fatal shooting

Officers were in their car in a well lit alley around midnight and both had their body cams turned off.

And the woman was in her PJ's ... but, both officer's cameras were not recording.

Lots of missing details at this point.

I can see one officer have their cam shut off. Maybe both if they were having chow. But in the squad car and responding to a call.

Do LEOs turn OFF their body cams when responding to calls? Is this normal? Trying to wrap my head around why you would NOT make sure your cameras were turned ON when going on a call.

A few sources have said the officer in the passenger seat shot her through the driver side door. Link

Well let alley, two officers responding, no body or dash cam footage, blonde in her pajamas and shots through the door.....sounds like someone is getting fired/going to jail.

We should not speculate till the investigation is done.
Conviction in press and media happens all to often, and we still have trials of you peers in courts of law.

The loss of life is tragic, and no words can console the family and friends.

They were responding to a call, investigating.  If a cop activated his cameras every time they did that Minneapolis would be spending a lot more money for video retention.  This is also new to them, they may not remember to do it.

Sure doesn't sound like a good shoot.  I think its probably a strong indication that this may not be up to par due to the Union staying silent.

Star Trib Union Silent

You have way too much faith in the system.  What's actually going to happen: the "thin blue line" is going to close ranks once again and use some lame excuse to get the cop off.  Just like every, single one of these other summary executions.

You know as well as I do that's not what I'm talking about.  Your reply is about as pathetic as the statists who start whining about "essential" services the moment someone talks about cutting government spending when that's far from the first line item on anybody's mind.

this is a very sad situation,
I'm sure if the women was black and the cop was white the trial would already be over and they would be burning the town down ......

Which is why the media isn't exploding over this, gotta protect the protected class.

This is already getting swept under the carpet... no more interviews or updates and the Muderapolis Mayor is refusing interviews on this topic (pointing to their website for more non-answers).

BLM gave up caring on Wednesday.

Why not have the body cameras on all the time?   Video storage < law suits.

Retention costs LOTS of money, if they wanted to store 24/7 coverage that would completely eclipse the whole budget of the city.

These body cameras are expensive.  Units themselves can be expensive, large software licensing fees, set up fees, yearly maintenance, continued contractual licensing fees so on and so forth.  Its expensive, but nothing compares to the cost of retention on servers.

Not sure where you are getting this from.  H.264/265 compresses very well.  

HD video is about 3GB per hour.  That's 24GB for an 8 hour officer shift.  

MPD has 800 sworn officers.  If each of those officers does an 8 hour shift every day...

800*8*3GB is 19,200GB per day of data, or 19TB per day.  Lets keep that data for 30 days, or 600TB per month.   Roughly calculated, thats about $15000 per month using AWS storage.  You could cut that down to about half by only keeping 7 days online and the rest gets pumped into Amazon Glacier.

Considering The Philando incident alone probably cost over 5 million in legal and settlement fees, that $15K a month in storage fees is pretty trivial, like I said.

I'm also guessing I way over estimated the storage needs.  I doubt each officer works an 8 hour shift every day of the year.  

# of officers X 40 hr work week would be a closer # of hours.  And, you wonder then would that be right
with officers doing admin work or investigations etc with confidential informants etc. so many variables.

Video retention is going to cost Minneapolis millions a year.  

Law enforcement doesn't normally compress files.  Data is normally stored on in house servers.  Minneapolis policy dictates they're to retain sole possession of the video unless a need is there to release it.

A small department, medium calls for service and using cameras when needed can easily fill one server in a year.

I'd also like to point out the fact that it is not as black and white to get funding for anything in public sectors.

They don't have to compress the files, the video is likely compressed on the fly, just like on your cell phone.  You'd need some pretty expensive solid state storage to keep up with recording uncompressed 1080p video.

Looking at the specifications of many cameras, they only have 32GB of storage.  Assuming you need enough storage to last at least an 8 hour shift, worst case scenario, the compression ratio is already pretty high.

The storage estimates were just that, estimates using a well known cost calculator.  It doesn't really matter where it's stored.  I don't have numbers for NetApp or EMC at hand.  In any case, there are entities with much more sensitive data than MPD using AWS storage.  If MPD isn't using the most cost effective solution, they are shorting tax payers.

Reading the MPD BWC policy, they only save the clips of specific listed incidents.
<quote>
9.      Officers shall upload all BWC digital data at the conclusion of their shift by placing their BWC in the assigned docking stations or utilizing other department approved uploading procedures.
a.       Officers shall classify recorded events as appropriate, based on the options available under the classification and storage software.
b.      This classification should be done shortly after the recorded incident is concluded, but must be done prior to upload at the end of the officer’s shift. 
c.       The following classification options will be used:
Category                                                         Retention Period
 
·         Training                                                    90 Days
·         Test/Start Checks                                      1 Year
·         Petty Misdemeanor                                    1 Year
·         Non-Evidentiary/General Recording           1 Year
·         Any Arrest or Misdemeanor Citation           7 Years
·         Use of Force                                             7 Years
·         Significant Event                                      Until Manually Deleted/Indefinite Retention (Minimum of 7 years)
·         Pending Review                                        Retained until otherwise classified under above categories
</quote>

So it appears each officer, at the end of their shift, is required to classify each video, so it's stored at the appropriate retention period.  That would significantly reduce the amount of storage required.

You're forgetting licensing fees, maintenance, personnel to handle this data and prepare it. Who's going to do the yearly audit? Hardware fees? It's not like they are storing this data on a passport external hard drive. A small town agency that I work with on a routine basis is exploring these options and learned that having an external source to audit their data could cost up to $15,000.  How much would this be for Minneapolis PD?

Your numbers also only show a fraction of what will need to be saved. What you upload will be included with 7 years of use of force and 7 years misdemeanor citations and arrests along with the 1 years worth of petty misdemeanors. I wonder how many misdemeanor arrests and tickets are written by Minneapolis PD on a daily basis.

The licensing fees maintenance, audits, etc, are all fixed costs which are the same regardless if they store 1 minute or 1 day of video.

And your thought process assumes officers will never get ambushed and those who walk a beat will always have time to turn on their cameras when they are dealing with something in real time on the street.

The cameras should always, always be rolling.  The decision on what to save/not to save can be made later.

There is no such thing as fixed costs when it comes to revolving technology.  State laws and agency policies are ever changing. It's going to cost a lot more to maintain all these video files as time goes on. Amazon Glacial isn't a secure option for storage.

My thought process as an leo is that ambushes are very real and can happen. Thank you for your incorrect assumption about me. I also know that a body camera isn't going to depict depth perception, color perception, what I'm thinking or what I know, and isn't going to capture the entire scene through its lense. It's more than likely not going to capture an ambush.

This is not how IT and service subscriptions work.

Most municipalities purchase annual services and that is what makes budgeting easier to establish.

And most often, public subscribers like to have a 3-5 yr contract to work off of as its less book keeping on a year-over-year basis.

Back40  knows his shit on this one.

not all cameras roll 24x7. They only need them during duty. 8-12 hours and officers still have the option to turn them off even in the most totalitarian contracts. (potty breaks, entering an area with restrictions like where cameras are not permitted....etc.)

And not all recordings are worth saving. Nearly every instance of body cams for cops state that the material will be expired in 90 days or such if not part of an investigation. Legal hold is something that gubmints are very well aware of.

NAS storage appliances are so damn cheap (per TB) these days, your talking about less than $150/TB and a total years worth is less than the legal fees involved with doing a detailed discovery using other methods.

The idea that "its too expensive to store" goes out the window pretty quickly.

That was not what was said earlier.  It was said that the cameras should roll the whole shift, you know what I meant by 24/7.

got that right....

Small update:

Charging decision in Justine Damond shooting case expected by year’s end

Freeman is "mostly" a law and order kinda guy and I expect that if there is evidence that justified the offer to draw his weapon in the first place, it will be taken into account.

Not much of an update, but, the political football is getting tossed around. This is usually the sign of an inditement of a gubmint official right around the corner.

B*tches bitching at each other

Dig a bit deeper at the end of the article, we find this tidbit.

So it sounds like Harrity either had no idea that he partner was going to shoot or that he was unaware that his partner had drawn his firearm. Harrity had NOT drawn his service pistol and the squad car was in park when the shooting took place.

IMHO they should NOT be running 24/7

turn them on anytime you have anything resembling a "call"

these just don't have the storage and battery fro all day recording.

a way around storage is cloud-- the companies offer it, but it aint cheap.  like $30/mo per device.  compare that to servers/NAS

Not sure why this concept is so hard....

The battery power to record for 12 hours is trivial.  Unlike your cell phone, where most of the battery goes to the display or to the radio (cell or WiFi), these devices don't have that.

You don't need to store everything you record.  You only need to save that which is documented in protocol (arriving at a call or something that required you to file a report for, etc).  You don't need to store lunch hour, the time your sat in the car filling out the traffic ticket, drive time between calls, etc.

How much does the city of Minneapolis payout in law suits every year?  The cost comparison is trivial I'm sure.  For smaller departments, the payout might not be as immediate, but consider St. Anthony's payout in their recent case.  

Sooo..... if I don't have to keep the "lunch/bathroom/report writing" stuff....who is going to sort all that out and keep the "good stuff"?
All video WILL be retained for xxx length of time depending on event-- of course some will eventually drop out as useless video and be deleted, but a lot of it will need to be kept for 7 years.  This is going to take a F-ton of storage.
Can I turn my camera off while at lunch? Taking a duker?  What does the policy say?
If I enter a place I should not be recording and something goes down...can I record?
What is public?  What if a citizen decides they dont like officer XXXX and requests all of his/her video?  You going to provide that?


There are a TON of in/outs with these-- THAT is why they are taking so long to implement and get a good plan going

the way i understood the concept of them always recording is that it is constantly recording and overwriting itself.
when something happens (shooting, fight, angry words ect...) the camera stores the last x minutes and continues storing anything new after that point

Software to put the day's video up on a screen, select a portion, tag it with a case number or some other indicator is pretty damn trivial.

Cops get ambushed at meal time, it's happened before, so why not?

I follow viridian on instagram and they are working on a camera that mounts to the pic rail similar to a weapon light. The cam turns on when the weapon is drawn and obviously always looks in the direction the firearm is pointed. Looks interesting.