BWCs: Collecting The Data

What Body Camera Data Should Police Collect and When?

Source

Route Fifty (2015)

Authors

Nelson Bunn and Bryan Cunningham 

In the first article (http://www.routefifty.com/2015/09/police-body-cameramusts/121502/) of our three-part series on widespread deployment of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by law enforcement, we argued that policymakers and law enforcement leaders face a broad and complex set of decisions that must be made now. These vital decisions divide into the same basic categories as most big data or technology policy questions:

  • collection and Analysis Data 
  • storage (including cloud storage), disclosure and retention or destruction of data
  • and secondary use and repurposing of data 

As our second article of this series, we consider the most important collection issues that must be decided immediately upon BWC deployment, in order to forestall complex problems down the line. While there are important economic and compatibility decisions to be made in purchasing BWCs themselves, the tough problems really begin when the cameras are turned on and petabytes of video, and potentially audio, data begin to stream into servers located at law enforcement agencies and in the cloud.

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