Davis County Commission hears plan to ease strain on law-enforcement video storage; staff proposes $180,000 platform, cloud backup and specialist hire

Davis County Commission members on Thursday heard a detailed presentation from county IT and the attorney’s office about mounting storage and access pressures created by body‑worn and in‑vehicle camera footage and a steady rise in litigation and records requests.

Jeff Hassett, of Commission Systems, told commissioners the county stores most agency video on an on‑premises WatchGuard system and that evidence needed for prosecution is moved into the attorney’s eProsecutor system, which aggregates material from more than a dozen agencies. Hassett said the county recorded more than 30 terabytes of case‑file video in 2023 and that 2024 had already surpassed 2023’s volume as of two weeks before the meeting.

Hassett summarized the storage and legal constraints that complicate automated purging: “An officer shall activate the body or camera prior to any law enforcement encounter or as soon as reasonably possible,” he said, summarizing the county’s recording policy, and added that prosecutors often must retain files for litigation, appeals and post‑conviction work well beyond automated sheriff retention schedules.

The presentation identified several operational limits that increase costs: WatchGuard requires a free 5 percent buffer of storage to operate; eProsecutor relies on a daily temporary upload area that can block uploads when full; and deduplication only removes exact, byte‑for‑byte duplicates, so redacted, clipped or re‑encoded files remain separate copies.

As short‑term steps, Hassett recommended moving eProsecutor to its own, dedicated platform to provide roughly three to four years of growth capacity at an estimated one‑time cost of $180,000 and adding an off‑site backup solution (he cited Azure cloud backup) at about $15,000 annually. He also urged adding technical support and training, and said the county should consider a dedicated video technician to centralize routine editing and preparation while attorneys retain the ability to do last‑minute work.

Hassett described related budget items already under consideration — software licensing and upgraded machines for video rendering — but said the $180,000 storage request was not yet in the department’s budget and would be an additional ask. He said some Adobe video‑editing licenses cost about $450 per user per year; correcting an arithmetic error in the presentation, 36 such licenses would total about $16,200 annually, not the larger figure cited in the presentation.

Commissioners and staff also flagged a separate operational problem in courtrooms: county staff said the state removed county Wi‑Fi gear from the court building late last year and county access remains unreliable. County counsel and operations staff discussed the possibility of a breach‑of‑contract claim and said they had raised the issue with the attorney for administrative operations and courts, but that they prefer a negotiated fix that restores usable access.

Next steps outlined at the meeting: staff will include the storage and licensing requests in the county’s upcoming budget meetings and return with firmer cost and staffing proposals. The motion to go temporarily into closed session at the start of the meeting was approved by unanimous voice vote; no closed‑session details were disclosed during the public session.

The commission recessed after the presentation; budget hearings on the county’s request are scheduled to begin next week, when staff will present line‑item figures and timing.