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SFPD body‑camera pilot: 50 cameras planned, department warns multi‑year storage and staffing costs
Summary
The SFPD outlined a pilot to issue 50 Taser Axon body cameras, citing a $679 hardware price per unit and multi‑year storage and personnel costs estimated at roughly $1.1 million over four years. Command staff emphasized privacy, retention and PRA staffing as major implementation challenges.
The San Francisco Police Department told the Police Commission on Jan. 14 that its proposed body‑camera pilot would issue 50 Taser Axon units to plain‑clothes supervisors for searches and entries and is currently funded in part by a Department of Justice COPS grant. Commander Robert Moser said the camera hardware costs $679 per unit and that the pilot requires additional accessories, an evidence management platform and substantial data‑storage and personnel support.
"The cameras are the Taser Axon body cameras... the camera itself costs $679 per unit," Commander Moser said while outlining the pilot's technical and operational parameters. He explained that storage needs depend on recording frequency and quality and presented a low‑use scenario—50 officers recording two hours per day—where first‑year pilot costs approach $449,000 and four‑year pilot costs could total roughly $1.1 million. Chief information staff provided a per‑gig estimate for storage that the department used to model multi‑year expenses.
Beyond raw storage costs, department staff highlighted the personnel and legal workload required to process, review and redact videos for public‑records requests and discovery. Commander Moser said the department must consider retention rules tied to evidence and police‑report attachments (currently seven years for evidence tied to police reports), and the staffing required to review hours of video to comply with PRA and discovery obligations.
Commissioners pressed several implementation questions, including whether the department could keep non‑evidentiary footage for a shorter retention window (30–60 days) unless an incident requires longer preservation, use of internal servers versus vendor storage, whether cameras would be always‑on or manually activated, and how to scale the pilot if successful. CIO Susan Merritt explained storage assumptions, saying, in their model, "for about a dollar fifty a year, you can store an hour of video"—a metric used to estimate cumulative storage costs.
Commissioners generally supported piloting the technology but emphasized rigorous policy guardrails on activation, privacy protections for sensitive investigations, staffing for PRA requests and a clear retention‑deletion policy. The commission did not expand the pilot at the meeting; staff said the draft policy is in meet‑and‑confer stages with OCC, the POA and the city attorney and that pilot staffing and retention rules remain under discussion.
