Rochester Today – Potential Police Body Camera Pitfalls

Law enforcement agencies are running into unexpected problems associated with the use of so-called "body cameras."

Rochester City Attorney Terry Adkins is a regular guest of Tracy McCray and Andy Brownell during the Rochester Today show on KROC-AM. During his appearance Wednesday morning, Adkins indicated he recently returned from a national conference of city attorneys and attended a session concerning the growing use of the body cameras by police.

He says the Duluth Police Department is among the law enforcement agencies that have embraced the new technology only to discover significant pitfalls. The first should have been foreseeable. Adkins says Duluth officials are struggling to develop inexpensive methods for storing and organizing the massive amount of digital video produced by the cameras which are ALWAYS recording when an officer is on duty. Digital video files, even when compressed, are large and the space required to store them would quickly climb into the terabyte range.

Adkins says an even larger problem has been dealing with requests from citizens and advocacy groups to view the body camera videos, which under current state law are public. He says the Duluth Police Department has had to assign an employee full-time to the task of going through the videos and separating out segments that cannot be made public because they involve ongoing investigations, include images of children or disclose confidential information. Adkins says the group was told that a police department in Washington State has decided to drop its use of body cams because of the storage and public access challenges.

The Rochester Police Department is expected to begin a pilot program involving the use of the body cameras this year.

Click on the play button below to listen to the entire show.