Videos which the police record. Personally, if a video did exist, then it belongs to both the police department and the citizen on the video. It should be retained until both parties agree to deletion. Of course, that could get expensive. Worth thinking about.
Phil Reads
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Come now. Electronic storage is cheap, and getting cheaper every minute. The “expensive” argument won’t wash.
From a legal standpoint, I think any police department would be insane to keep that sort of video on a systematic basis — it’s just raw material for fishing-expedition lawsuits. But that’s a matter of policy, not budgets.
As video recordings become more commonplace, especially if officers themselves start wearing cameras (like a few pilot programs around the country are doing), the data storage requirements could become pretty impressive unless a schedule of offloading is agreed upon.
Say, the police keep video of a citizen contact (traffic or otherwise) for 90-120 days. After the initial contact, if an arrest was made or a citation issued, the citizen would get a notice telling them that the video was available for download or pickup (free to download, get charged a fee if you want it on DVD) and would remain so until the limit was hit. If no action was taken as a result of the contact, it would be up to the citizen to request a copy in time. After that, the video would be deleted, unless the police or DA wanted it for evidence, or the citizen wished to file a formal complaint. Then the video would go into a longer term storage archive.
Ummm, no. Police agencies are worse than the worst-case “hoarders” shown on that reality show.
There are PAPER files, such as patrol officer’s daily logs, going back 10-20 years, simply because there’s no room in the average PD’s budget for sufficient records management, so the Administrative Sergeant simply bundles them up monthly, quarterly or yearly, with twine, and tosses them in a box of other such bundles. The boxes eventually get moved out of the precinct building, and are taken to some County or City storage building, where they just molder away slowly.
Somehow, just because it’s easier to archive digital media, I don’t believe that the mindset would have changed, so my guess is that such files never get deleted at all.
I wonder how much money a city like Seattle would have to spend to modernize record keeping for the PD?