The California Highway Patrol anticipates the Department of Technology will release the bid specifications for its Body Worn Camera pilot project in early May.
A vendor for the project will be selected before the project begins this summer, CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow told a State Senate budget subcommittee on April 14. Farrow said the project is going well so far and that he's cautiously optimistic.
"Keep in mind that the California Highway Patrol makes contact with about 4.3 million people per year. All of those would be captured on video, and so we do have to store those. And that was problematic for us to decide if we were going to use cloud or we were going to use [local] servers. And so we're going to use both during our tests to find out which one actually works best for us," Farrow said.
The CHP also will have to determine how it will release the video data when it's requested, Farrow added.
SB 85 requires the CHP to develop a plan for implementing a Body Worn Camera pilot program. CHP will test the body cameras at field offices in Oakland in Stockton. At the conclusion of the pilot, CHP will send a report to the Legislature on the test's outcome, likely in late 2017 or early 2018.
The Department of Finance is proposing to spend a total of $919,000 on the pilot: $853,000 for hardware, including cameras, dedicated video workstations, servers, charging bays, routers and data storage equipment; $24,000 for software for dedicated video workstations and servers; $4,000 for telecommunication upgrades to accommodate additional data; and $38,000 for contract services for server and hardware configuration and training.
