Town officials on Tuesday approved an approximately $33,000 contract for cloud software storage of evidence footage recorded by New Canaan Police body and vehicle cameras.
The department is required to retain video and audio recordings for various amounts of time depending on what the footage is—for example, according to Capt. Joseph Farenga, drunk-driving arrests must be stored for two years.
“For our standard footage, I believe it’s 60 or 90 days that we hold onto it if there’s no incident associated with it,” he told members of the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of renewing NCPD’s $33,400 one-year contract with Wallingford-based Telrepco.
Carlson noted that there’s “only one data storage company that all the police use in the state of Connecticut,” saying she envisions the cost of storage to rise with the proliferation of body cameras in law enforcement. She asked Farenga whether there are other providers.
Farenga said he was unsure how many providers of storage are currently servicing law enforcement.
“It’s something we’ll obviously look into as we’re going forward,” he said. “Telrepco is a company that provides all the stuff that we’ve contracted with to this point with our camera systems and cars and the body cameras and things like that. It’s definitely something we’ll continue to explore as we go forward to see what other options are available, if there’s anything at a better price point. Because to your point, it’s going to most likely go up and get competitive, so there might be other vendors we can transfer to in the future.”
The selectmen also asked whether body cameras are on all the time (as long as they’re powered on, they can save the past 30 seconds of video without audio), whether the audio always has to be activated by an officer (yes) and whether there are best practices or state guidelines regarding how long videos are stored (state guidelines).
Karl asked how well the officers like wearing them.
Farenga said: “It’s great. When we first started cameras years ago, we were one of the first departments that launched officers having cameras before there was a mandate, it was split, because people weren’t sure, but it’s actually been more helpful than anything for the officers because we’ve had more complaints that are just completely negated, or once you have the full context, it’s OK, the officer actually didn’t do what you thought they did or you’re saying they did. And it really only takes one incident like that where an officer’s cleared of any accusations of wrongdoing to get everybody on board.”