Saved Videos from Baltimore Unrest Limit Surveillance Footage Storage Capacity

The decision to retain hours of Baltimore’s CitiWatch camera footage of Freddie Gray's arrest and the subsequent unrest in the city has limited the current capacity of CCTV cameras to three days, according to a recent article by the Baltimore Sun. Baltimore’s decision to save video surveillance footage of the Baltimore unrest drastically shrinks the time police have to save footage to help with other ongoing criminal investigations.

According to a Baltimore Sun report, the capacity of the city’s 700 CitiWatch cameras have been reduced from 28 days to just three.  City officials state that surveillance videos with any illegal activity are completely wiped clean after 72 hours unless a police officer shows up and asks to save it.

“Both citizens and law enforcement have come to appreciate the benefits of video in preventing crime and documenting interactions between police and suspects,” states Van Ristau, Chief Technology Officer at DLT Solutions. “However, the growth in fixed surveillance systems operated by cities as well as the increased adoption of police body cameras are placing high demands on existing video storage capacity,” he explains.

In a statement from Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, she explained that officials examined all options and decided cutting some cameras' retention capacity was the best. “Video capture itself is ultimately ineffective without sufficient video storage and archiving of associated date/time/location metadata for later objective forensic analysis. Communities will need to understand that the increased use of video necessitates budgeting for an expansion of their storage and archiving infrastructure,” Ristau says.

The Mayor’s office also explained that expanding their storage with other options, such as copying the videos onto external hard drives or saving them in a cloud-based storage system, are not feasible at this time.