Assuming all goes as planned, St. Paul police officers will be outfitted with body cameras by the end of the fall. It seemed like the most difficult hurdle was cleared last month when laws were passed regarding the use of body cameras and footage storage/access, but now some are concerned about the price tag of the new technology.
According the police Cmdr. Axel Henry, the technology is going to cost roughly $721,000 annually by 2018, and that’s after a first year cost of $1.3 million. Cmdr. Henry said the it will be expensive to store the footage from roughly 400 body cameras, costing about $382,000. Storage is only half the battle, however, as the department will need to staff new personnel to sift through the footage and review recordings for court cases. They plan to hire five full-time employees just to manage the data, which will cost another $274,000 annually.
“Full-time employees are probably one of the scarier factors any department is dealing with,” said police Cmdr. Axel Henry.
It’s scary because the department isn’t sure if five people are going to be able to handle the workload. The 400 officers will record nearly a terabyte of data a day, or enough video to fill roughly 44,000 160GB iPads. These workers aren’t going to be able to simply grab a full recording based on time stamps alone, either. They’ll need to review the footage in real time to ensure sensitive and confidential information is not made public. This will be difficult, especially considering the fact that the cameras will be running most of the time, and many radio transmissions contain private conversations.
“I guarantee it will take more than four employees,” Henry said. Henry is asking that they budget for five employees, but he believes it might take eight full-time staff members to meet the new demands.
Looking At Other Departments
St. Paul may only need to look to its sister city to get a better understanding of the financial burden of police body cameras. The city of Minneapolis hopes to have 615 officers outfitted with cameras in the not-so-distant future, and they only plan on hiring two full-time staff members to sift through the footage. Minneapolis said they are willing to hire more staff if necessary, but they plan on starting with two people at the outset. Minneapolis also expected to pay $1.65 million in body cameras costs in the first year and $930,000 in yearly costs. Those costs are expected to increase by the time each officer is fitted with a device, as they are slowly adding cameras to the force. In the end, they expect to pay roughly $1.2 million each year in operational and storage costs for the technology.
While there’s no doubt that the cameras will cost money, the fact of the matter is that they’ll also save the department plenty of money. In some instances, they may actually pay for themselves in terms of preventing frivolous lawsuits. People won’t be able to wrongly accuse police of excessive force or brutality if the recording shows the citizen is lying, and police will be less likely to excessively handle a suspect if they know their actions are being recorded. It will be difficult to quantify just how much the cameras will save the department each year, but I bet the city of St. Paul will pay out less money in lawsuits in the once their officers are outfitted with cameras.
