Police body cameras come with hidden cost

More and more law enforcement agencies across the Carolinas are now equipped with body cameras, but the equipment isn't cheap.

The cameras are costing some larger departments millions of dollars.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers test body cameras before they begin their shift.

Since the department starting using body cameras, it has accumulated more than a half-million videos  -- of incidents ranging from high-risk police encounters to routine traffic stops -- that it keeps in storage.

Officer Blake Page has worn the equipment since 2015 and is a strong advocate for body cameras.

"Cameras tell the truth. They're an independent third party. They have no fight in the matter,” Page said.

But that transparency comes at a cost of $1.3 million for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department each year.

What may be surprising is that the cameras themselves cost the department only $77 apiece, but the licensing fee for a camera is more than five times that cost -- and the department has 3,500.

"Part of that licensing in the contract allows us to use that for unlimited storage,” Capt. Mike Harris said.  “Right now, we have somewhere about 500,000 videos in storage ranging from 30 seconds up to an hour."

At a minimum, department policy requires each video be kept for at least 45 days. In high-profile felony cases, the video can be kept for decades.

Sometimes an officer can record three hours of video during one shift.

The Police Department uses a cloud service instead of in-house servers to maintain all the data. The company it uses is Axon.

"With an agency this large, the amount of servers we would need to hold a half-million videos is significant,” Harris said. “This is a significant cost savings for us and the city to go with this type of program."

But some smaller departments have opted to pay much more for the equipment upfront and save money on video storage later.

The Morganton Public Safety Department bought body cameras for 55 officers at a cost of $1,200 for each camera and mount, and it stores the videos at department headquarters.

"We did about $25,000 of software upgrades to be able to house all the storage,” Maj. Ryan Lander with Morganton Public Safety said. “If we went with a cloud-based storage option, you're talking about well over $100,000 a year."

Morganton expects to have to upgrade its cameras and servers every five years, costing the department an additional $100,000.

Nationwide, law enforcement agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars to equip officers with cameras and pay for video storage, but the departments believe it's money well spent, and something the public demands.

"This is more than the $6 million,” Harris said. “This is about transparency. This about the nature of social media. This is how we do policing now."

"A lot of groups and individuals don't realize it comes with a cost, and that cost eventually comes to the taxpayers who have to fund the program,” Lander said.

Cox Media Group