Australian woman in Minnesota calls cops then is fatally shot by one of the officers

[*michaelsean*]

(07-18-2017, 09:50 AM)Au165 Wrote: So it's actually a really complex issue the LE community has been trying to navigate for a while now. So a couple things to consider.

One major issue is the amount of data these things consume. People want high definition video from these things which means it is a large amount of data. They want the data to be inaccessible to the officers which means it has to be moved up to a cloud server somewhere. They want it to be kept for an insanely long amount of time to go back and reference. When you consider these  things what you realize is moving this data and storing it is very expensive. What then must happen is to keep costs manageable you have to limit when they are on.

That SOP for body camera use is different from department to department. In some departments they only use them at traffic stops, in others they have different times it's on. Simply leaving them on all the time isn't feasible because of the costs associated with it when you start extrapolating that cost for each officer out over 365 days a year. If what has been said was they were still in their car that could have been why they weren't on. Some departments to fight the issue of the data costs have the cameras turn on automatically when they leave the vehicle.

Something else to consider are the privacy issues around them. These are government employees recording things. While out in the street they are freely allowed to record as there is no expectation of privacy, but what happens if they leave it on when they enter a residence or a private business? These things are real issues they are still trying to deal with.

Don't confuse my explanation here about body cameras, with any sort of stance on this particular instance. I am in a LE industry and so I am familiar with this issue and wanted to add some thought onto the idea of "why wouldn't they be on?".

I wrote that before I noticed that they hadn't even exited the car.  I wouldn't expect them to have them on in the car.