The advent of the body-mounted camera is causing a new issue in law enforcement: a lack of digital storage.
That’s why the Burlington Police Department and Des Moines County Sheriff’s Department are looking to expand digital storage for their respective departments. To do so, they’re using $19,400 between the two departments from an annual grant disbursement to purchase new server equipment.
Burlington Police Chief Doug Beaird says that the department is looking to have the capacity to store videos that can be easily accessed for between 90-120 days before being permanently burned to a Blu-Ray disk. With the expansion of body worn cameras, now utilized by the entire Burlington Police Department, storage space for that video is at a premium.
“Now, once we’re out of the car, if our dash cam isn’t going to cover it, our body camera is going to cover it. So now instead of [having a camera recording] 30-40% of the time it’s more like 80-90% of the time, so your storage more that doubles, or sometimes triples,” Beaird told KBUR hosts Steve Hexom and Rob Sussman. He appeared on the KBUR Talkshow along with Sheriff Mike Johnstone and Sheriff’s Lt. Brett Grimshaw on Thursday.
The $11,000 storage upgrade being purchased by the city will add 60 Terabytes of storage, that’s 60,000 Gigabytes. The Sheriff’s Department will purchase an additional body camera and $7,000 in new storage.
