In today's world a camera that only records 640×480 and can only preserve 30 seconds of video and costs $400 seems to be setting a pretty low bar.
I don't know how long your average police person's shift is, but say it's 8 hours, you could record video at 2 mbit/s and store a complete stream of that whole 8 hours in 60 gigabytes of flash storage and then you wouldn't be reliant on a cop to press the "hey save what just happened" button on the camera.
What if the officer was incapacitated and couldn't press the button? Â What if the officer is behaving badly? Â Why in the world would they press the button?
You could even have a button for the officer to press to mark sections of the video so you didn't have to peruse hours and hours of video to find interesting parts.
Now, I'm not saying it would be easy to create such a camera.  You'd have to have sufficient battery capacity and you'd have to think about flash durability, but those are not insurmountable obstacles.
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Could This Camera Prevent Police Brutality?
Taser–the world’s favorite non-lethal weapons manufacturer–says its new surveillance device can protect both cops and citizens.
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Yeah, my phone cost a hundred more than that and, aside from all the functions coming from it being a pocket computer, has a better camera and has a microSD card slot. This is a low bar indeed.
You could setup a rasberry pi with a 1080p camera that could fit just about anywhere, run on a cheap battery for hours at a time, and upload video via wifi for less than $150, so $400 for what those things can do is really just hiking the prices up to make it spread slower and be less useful in every possible way…
Agreed. The camera is way too wimpy to do its job properly. I can see having a system like that tied to their gun, so whenever it gets pulled out of the holster, the camera records audio and video for as long as the gun is in use.
Now I can understand some of the cost factor. Camera needs to be ruggedized (water and shockproof), long battery life with a simple recharging system, be able to handle a wide range of lighting conditions, time stamping, and simple to operate.
Double the image sensor size, have at least an 8 hour battery life, do a gps location tag (although the location resolution wouldn't be all that great for something that small), along with the timestamp, voice activated – which records for at least 60 seconds after the last sound.Â
Long story short: We need to invest into robot cops.Â
Robot cops who will patrol the mean streets of Detroit! 😀
It seems pretty obvious that to prevent plausible deniability on the part of the cops, you either have to have a constantly-rolling camera, or at least a much longer buffer than 30 seconds (say 2 hours), so there is no plausible excuse for not capturing.
And with Moto G's at <$150, and the MIL-STD-810G certified Rugby Pro at $250, you can surely do a lot of battery-adding and toughening within the budget.
A lot of police officers in UK has cameras. Â Just saying.Â
Also, most of the times they don't have firearms, but have cameras. Â Just saying again. Â
So, basically, this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ASOR9OE0j4M/UN26goYai-I/AAAAAAAAU4E/sCRbJft1Seo/s400/enhanced-buzz-20971-1355507700-0.jpg
cool, now the cops can join the 20th century, with a camera from the beginning of it.