At a recent city council meeting, Police Chief Robert Nader proposed changing body camera platforms for the Fort Mitchell Police Department.
The Fort Mitchell Police Department has been using body cameras in some capacity since July 2015. They currently have body cameras on their officers and cameras in police cruisers, and Nader is considering switching their storage platform from Motorola to Axon.
The current platform uses Motorola Watchguard Body Cameras, which stores body and car camera videos onto a physical server at the police department. Physical servers like these have many deficits compared to cloud-based servers, including an increased security risk. Security breaches can come from outside the organization in the form of malware attacks and other cyber crimes. However, cybersecurity also relates to issues within the organization, physical servers can experience hardware failures.
During those failures, the data and files stored in the server may be inaccessible for an amount of time or even corrupted.
Nader brought up that this is a real concern for Fort Mitchell.
“Recordings are stored on a server instead of the cloud. Last year, it broke down. This was a headache for prosecutors and a headache for us,” he said.
Anthony Tsetse, head of the Cyber Security and Information Technology program at Northern Kentucky University, points out that on-site servers can be difficult for organizations to manage, which can lead to more server failures.
“Depending on the resources available, [a department] may not have the requisite skill set inhouse to properly manage the data stored on the premises securely,” Tsetse said.
Additionally, Axon Body Cameras would provide unlimited cloud storage. But what Nader emphasized the most is that Axon includes artificial intelligence software to redact faces in camera footage.
This importance of this comes when minors are questioned. They have the right to not have their faces shown in court. With the current body camera platform, Nader said that it’s difficult to redact those parts of videos in a timely manner.
“Right now, we have to use Adobe Acrobat, just like you would,” Nader told LINK nky.
The current process requires a tech to bring footage to a separate program to edit it, which poses another security risk.
“I would rather have an all-in-one platform … It makes it easier for the prosecutors when they try to prosecute cases,” Nader said. “Since Axon is the only company that can offer both body cameras and tasers together, we are bundling the body cameras, [unlimited] cloud-based storage, and the newest model of Taser for each officer.”
The cost for 16 new body cameras and tasers all together would be $24,512 annually over the next 10 years, he added. This price, which includes all installation and training, would be locked in once the agreement is made.
Fort Mitchell Police Department would lose its in-car cameras. However, Axon body cameras offer a unique feature to supplement this and improve body camera use throughout the city, Nader explained.
“Sometimes in high stress situations, you forget to turn on your body camera,” he said, but this system would trigger the body camera to turn on automatically whenever an officer flips on the “light bar” of their car.
The council approved Nader’s purchase proposal unanimously.