Freddie Gray Unrest Costing City Surveillance Storage Space
BALTIMORE (WJZ) --Not enough storage.
Video captured by city surveillance cameras during the arrest of Freddie Gray and the unrest that followed is eating away at the storage space on the city's private system.
The issue could make investigations and arrests more difficult for police to complete.
Marcus Washington has more on how this could affect police work.
With some 700 citiwatch cameras keeping a birds-eye view on Baltimore, keeping the house of footage can be difficult.
But it can come in handy during any questionable behavior or activity.
That footage that can help police during an investigating or during a trial is in jeopardy.
With the decision by the city to keep all the footage connected the city's unrest in April, storage space has become limited.
The life of video has been reduced from 28 days to just three,
Meaning if an officer doesn't save the footage within 72 hours it's forever erased.
"We had a system that served us well. It did what we needed it to do, but we understand in the wake of the Freddie Gray incident, we needed to upgrade our hardware," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said. "We had to make an decision that would allow us to make sure we had all of the cameras online at the same time we did those upgrades and that's what we're working for."
The city has plans of spend $140,000 on new hardware for a long-term storage, but there is no word on what system the city will decide to move forward with and buy.
"We're trying to make sure that we can maintain the storage as well as plan for the hardware upgrade," Rawlings-Blake said.
The city spends $1.8 million annually on maintaining the camera system.
