Santa Rosa police body camera program gets $1 million reboot

Just two years after spending more than a half-million dollars to outfit its police officers with body cameras, Santa Rosa says it needs $1 million for an upgrade.

The VieVu cameras that its 120 officers currently use are already obsolete, and the local storage system is frustratingly slow and inefficient, officials told the council Tuesday.

Instead, the department wants to switch to cameras made by a competitor, Axon Enterprise Inc., and subscribe to the company’s cloud-based storage service for five years.

When the city selected VieVu in 2015, the department said it liked the simple operation of the cameras and the security of storing their data on a local server. That required the data to be downloaded and transferred into the city’s own digital evidence storage system, a process that took officers up to an hour at the end of their shifts, said Keith Hinton, the department’s technical services division manager.

Using the system created “frustration, confusion and an inefficient use of staff time,” Hinton wrote in his report to the council.

At the same time, VieVu and other providers switched away from supporting local storage solutions to using proprietary cloud-based services, Hinton said.

“It was a rapid evolution,” Chief Hank Schreeder said of the technology shift.

That left the city unable to upgrade to VieVu’s next-generation camera model because the newer models don’t work with the city’s storage software.

The new Axon cameras are easy to use, have faster transfer speeds, longer battery life and can be integrated with the city’s computer-aided dispatch system, Hinton said. Video can be previewed by officers on a cellphone, leaving the more time-consuming downloading process to take place after their shifts are complete, he explained.

The new system will take an average of 15 minutes instead of an hour, Hinton said.

The cameras and storage contract will cost $215,000 in the first year, and an additional $200,000 per year after that for a total contract value of just over $1 million. The contract comes with a guaranteed upgrade in 21/2 years to state-of-the-art cameras. The City Council approved the contract with little comment Tuesday.

The VieVu cameras, some of which went into service in early 2016, cost about $140,000. The video storage software cost an additional $94,000. Both will be phased out.

In all, the original program cost $536,000 to launch. The most expensive part was a digital evidence storage system that is still effective and expected to be used for years to come, Schreeder said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.