T
wo types of entities are involved when think-
ing of body cam storage. Various providers, often body cam manufacturers, offer solutions managing body cam evidence to collect, transfer it to storage, provide analyti- cal tools, redaction, track for chain of custody, and send the digital evidence to CJIS-approved storage. Many of these evidence management systems deal with Amazon, Google, or Microsoft or other large cloud storage systems and these large systems handle the security and cloud storage.
BodyWorn by Utility, Inc.
www.bodyworn.com
Utility President Ted Davis reports that BodyWorn is not only a body cam system but also an in-car video system. The Body- Worn Body Camera can be integrated with the Rocket IoT in-car DVR and Wireless Communications Hub to provide a complete evidence ecosystem for the department. In additional to typical police body and vehicle environments,
this system that can also be used in a prisoner transport vehicle, prison, interview room, and integrated with the department’s CAD/RMS and case management systems. It is a completely integrated ecosystem, cradle to grave, the only video evidence solution with multiple body/vehicle cameras synched, geo- graphically mapped, and tied together in one video evidence management and review tool for complete situational aware- ness of all video sources. The BodyWorn Generation II ecosystem is self-aware in that
if two offi cers with body cams enter any squad car, the in-car video system will recognize their body cams, establish a link, identify any known access points in proximity, provide a secure vault for video offl oad in the vehicle, and implement vehicle- based automatic triggers according to departmental policy. This prevents offi cers forgetting to activate their body cams in a crisis. The evidentiary chain of custody begins as soon as a law enforcement situation arises. Utility wants to get data off body-worn cameras as soon as it is recorded, following CJIS requirements that the chain of custody cannot be broken, and having unsecure video stored on a body camera can lead to a breach of data security. If an offi cer keeps recording on camera and there is some-
thing he doesn’t want seen, he can get rid of the camera. Keep- ing evidence on the cam until the end of day and docking is over. Utility gets it off the camera and into the Cloud directly, or into the vehicle DVR, which is a CJIS-compliant video vault. They then take the metadata. If it involves something like an offi cer confrontation that needs to be stored and go to the cloud, it goes automatically from trunk to cloud. When categorized as high classifi cation, data moves according to policy, directly to Amazon’s secure government cloud. Davis stated that their SaaS, unlimited, is $160 month for fi ve
years, totaling $9,600. “If you went to a competitor for an in- car system, two cams, VCR and warranty, not counting storage,
you would be paying $5-8,000 initially and over $10,000 for fi ve years. We have 99.999 percent resiliency, it will be available, and you won’t lose data. We are still lower cost with all the storage and back-end system, all cloud-based, and it goes through our evidence management system partnered with Amazon.” Davis pointed out that automatic redaction lowers the cost by millions for large agencies. ‘Smart redaction’ works only in the cloud because it takes hundreds of computers working simulta- neously to pull it off with their software algorithms. Without re- daction, transparency is not possible and with automated smart redaction, a video recorded today can be released today. Their redaction operates in a CJIS-compliant cloud, main-
taining the chain of evidence, not the case if you were run- ning it in another program to redact. “Since manipulation is in the Gov cloud, hand-in-hand with evidence management, not separate, we maintain chain of custody every time with editing or redaction.” Lindenau stated, “Everyone talks about video being stored
but no one talks about how often it is accessed. There is a big dif- ference if manufacturers charge license fees for people outside the offi ces to access or if you have unlimited access to data. If it is in the cloud and you have user interface, the DA or outside counsel can be assigned a role for a log-in access and they can only see videos that have been shared with them.”
Digital Ally, Inc.
www.DigitalAllyInc.com
Mark Gordon, Director of Technical Services at Digital Ally, re- ported they have built a cloud platform leveraging AWS storage and services and it is part of a package through Digital Ally. Their customers utilize
VuVualt.com to upload, store, and ac- cess their data, hosted by AWS. He stated that while currently customers are not gener-
ally buying a package for all digital image storage, this trend is growing and they are seeing the demand for all data to be centrally located and accessed. “Our platform allows for case management, so all digital media can be securely stored and associated to a particular case.” He stated that body-worn cameras are docked at the end of
the shift and once docked, they upload automatically without the user having to perform another step. In-car video is up- loaded automatically once the vehicle is near the department’s wireless access point. Updates to the
VuVualt.com platform are completely seamless to the user, a great benefi t of using AWS instead of a fully local solution. According to Gordon, “One of the largest benefi ts to smaller
and medium size departments is security. To stay secure in this day and age, you must be up-to-date. Your hardware, your soft- ware, your network, your policies; these are all things that re- quire technical knowledge and resources to maintain.
VuVault.com and AWS manage three of these tasks behind
the scenes, allowing us to quickly scale to our customer’s needs. With the correct policy, this allows them to be hands-off and concrete on their jobs. As they add body cameras, users, and data, we scale automatically, they never see this part—it is seam- less.”
Law enforcement agencies consider cost, security, accessibil-
ity, and redundant backup when choosing how to store digi-
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