wizardid

Much, much, much, much, much less than $8 million per month.

To be fair, I think if the data retention requirement was lowered for particular items like bodycam video, say from 3 years down to 3 months, it would be better than not having the video at all. 3 months would be enough time to allow someone to request that dashcam video be retained for a particular interaction, and now in your example, instead of $8.5M per month, they'd be looking at closer to $470k per month, or $5.6 million per year. Still a large number, but a lot more reasonable for a police force with an annual budget of $1.19 billion.

I'd like to think that the public, if given two choices (and were informed of it at the start of a potential bodycam program):

• "we have to retain all data X years, which means we can't have bodycams"

• "we are going to retain all data X years, except for bodycams which we will retain for a period of Y months"

they would choose the second option, as long as it was well announced up front.

But you do bring up very good points to temper my optimism. People will abuse the FOIA system. People will complain regardless of how transparent the government process is for managing the data. As for the privacy concerns, I'm not sure how those differ from the privacy concerns from police dashcams, and yet those are becoming ubiquitous.

How did you find out about Reddit / decide to do an AMA? Did someone point you to the website and suggest doing this, or did you find it on your own?

I don't know whether it's legal now, but I would contend that it should be legal, as long as the public is given sufficient notice of it prior to the policy being initiated. The government already has different policies for retention of different types of information, and I would think that creating a new category for this sort of data would be doable. Having a new set of data with a shorter retention policy seems strictly better than not having that set of data at all.

But reality being closer to what you describe, yeah, I think someone would likely sue and mess it up for everybody.