The Spokane Police Department spends about $310,000 a year for their body cameras, but officers say they want to keep the program despite high costs.
David Makin, a criminal justice professor at Washington State University, said the yearly cost for Spokane to store their police body camera footage is common.
“It is [common]. I mean you look at Norfolk, Virginia. The Norfolk Police Department, based on my last conversation, they were spending about $300,000 a year,” said Makin, who runs the Complex Social Interaction lab dedicated to analyzing body camera footage.
Makin said that the usage of body cameras should not stop solely at holding officers accountable.
“I’d say probably the hardest question agencies struggle with is, ‘how do you make use of the footage,'” Makin said. “It’s one thing to intake all these volumes of footage. What do you do with it?”