Summary
There has been a dramatic increase in the law enforcement use of body worn cameras (BWCs) in the last few years. Governmental and news media scrutiny of law enforcement interactions with the public has many people thinking that BWCs have the potential benefit of increased legitimacy and accountability for both citizens and the law enforcement community. Commercially available BWCs have flooded the market so that there are now over 60 different body worn cameras produced specifically for law enforcement use.
BWCs are cameras with at least one microphone and internal data storage, and allow audio/video footage to be stored and analyzed with compatible software. The cameras are typically located on the police officer’s chest or head.
The National Institutes of Justice (NIJ) wants to collect information on existing BWC technologies. Commercial BWC information is aggregated and summarized to aid law enforcement officers and public safety practitioners in the planning, acquisition, and implementation of this technology. This paper provides the methodology for developing the market survey and results from the market survey. For more background context for this BWC market survey, including policy and legal considerations for implementing BWCs, please refer to the accompanying NIJ BWC Market Survey Primer document.
To collect this information, a request for information (RFI) was created and posted as a Notice in the Federal Register, which was published on 28 April 2016 and expired on 31 May 2016 (see Appendix B for the full text). In addition, data was solicited directly from BWC product vendors. A total of 31 vendors responded to the RFI (BWC: n=28, Software: n=3). When vendors did not respond to our attempts to contact them, we obtained as much information as we could from their websites (BWC: n=10, Software: n=1). Some vendors had multiple BWC products. Most vendors provided BWC hardware, while some provided software only. From this research, we obtained information for 66 BWCs and 4 BWC data management software/storage standalone systems.
From this market survey, we uncovered the following: 1) there are many more vendors now that sell BWC products as compared to a previous market survey from 2014; 2) the incorporation by vendors of new technological BWC features prompts the strong need for clear policies; and 3) this is an evolving area of law and some legal issues are currently unclear with regard to BWCs.
This market survey presents an overview of the technologies available at the time of data collection. When considering an acquisition of BWC equipment, additional information should be sought from the specific vendors of interest.