If not reviewed properly, bodycam footage is an expensive wasted opportunity
For more than a decade now, many police departments in the United Kingdom and the United States have been using body cams as way to improving trust with the public police by providing transparency and accountability.
The devices used for this have evolved over time and have become a hub for permanent two-way communication, capturing high-definition video through one or two cameras (often one is worn on the chest, with a second point of view that is fixed to the head), as well as audio, precise location data, etc. This generates, when multiplied by the number of active police officers, huge amounts of video that must be stored and processed. In many cases, cameras and their cloud storage have become the most significant cost for police departments, with annual bills exceeding several million dollars.
However, a paradox arises: when a single police department accumulates several million hours of high-definition film, how can that footage be processed to find some kind of useful information? The answer seems clear: only interactions that really become a problem are reviewed, while the vast number of them are simply stored without anyone ever being looked at. In many cases, the families of victims of police violence have to fight in court to access body cam recordings of the police officers…
