Council OKs costs of storing footage from body cameras
City Council voted Wednesday to spend $1 million to buy servers and other equipment to store video collected by city police officers equipped with body cameras.
The vote, passed with relatively little fuss following months of sometimescontentious public debate, marks the next step in the Houston Police Department’s ongoing effort to equip more than 4,000 patrol officers with the devices.
The storage will cost the city about $8 million over five years, with about $585,000 more per year in additional staffing costs, officials said. An alternate proposal to use cloudbased storage would have cost the city even more.
Civil rights advocates and police departments across the country have united in calling for use of body cameras, which they say will bring more transparency to interactions between police officers and the public.
The move comes at a time when controversial and sometimes fatal encounters between law enforcement and members of the public have sparked demonstrations and riots in some parts of the country.
HPD previously had equipped about 100 officers with the devices in a pilot program. Earlier this month, the department outfitted about 280 officers at its Central Division with the cameras in the first phase of its departmentwide rollout. Stored by HPD
The city plans to purchase 4,500 body cameras, of which about 400 would be spares. Wednesday’s vote cleared the way for the city to purchase Dell Compellent computer servers with space to hold 1.5 petabytes of data, and a similar amount of space to hold a duplicate copy of the data.
One copy would be stored in HPD’s data center, with a separate copy stored in the city’s Disaster Recovery Center, according to the police department.
The move to store the data in-house had prompted worries from some that the data could be more easily tampered with, a concern Mayor Sylvester Turner brushed aside in brief remarks after the meeting.
“I’m comfortable the integrity of the system is sound,” he said. Cost concerns
The council’s fiscal hawks have expressed concerns about the cost of implementation.
“My issue is making sure that we’re set up for success and move our city forward and everyone has confidence in the body cameras and the policy and procedure, but at the same time we don’t get carried away and overspend in our willingness to do the right thing,” said Councilmember Brenda Stardig, chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee.
After the vote, Houston Police Officers’ Union president Ray Hunt said union officials had previously argued for the data to be stored with a private company, which they said could better store and retrieve the recordings and allay transparency concerns.
“We fought that battle and lost,” he said. Nevertheless, the union is calling for the deployment of the devices as fast as possible, he said.
“We don’t want to do anything to hold up the movement on getting these out,” he said, later adding: “If they screw up, it’s going to be on the city, and not on the HPOU.”
HPD, meanwhile, has said its plan includes “rigorous controls … and audit trails to assure the integrity of stored evidence.”
The council overwhelmingly approved the item on a voice vote. Two councilmembers — Michael Kubosh and Larry Green — voted against it.