All that bad boy, bad boy footage, gone forever.
Thousands of videos shot by Seattle Police Department patrol car dash cams during two days in July have been lost due to a storage system failure, the department reported this week.
SPD analysis of the data loss found that 2,283 in-car videos, primarily recorded July 13 and 14, failed to write to long-term storage. Less than 25 percent of the videos (or 537 of the 2,283) were of an evidentiary or investigative nature, SPD said in its blog post. The lost recordings included 89 arrests, 138 traffic citations, 95 oral warnings, 35 police street “Terry stop” contacts, 60 crisis contacts, and five incidents involving low-level type-one uses of force.
Most of the videos just showed officers conducting in-car video tests at the beginning of shifts, or responding to low-level disturbance calls.
“We were ultimately able to recover about half of the videos that were missing — about 3,000 videos,” Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller said in a story on MyNorthwest. “In the end, we have approximately 2,200 videos that could not be recovered.”
While SPD will not have video evidence to support some cases that are being investigated from those two dates, the department says it will move forward with those investigations.
The City of Seattle is reportedly implementing additional “technical and procedural controls and safeguards” to guard against a repeat of this type of data loss.
