Ars Technica brings us an update to an earlier story in which a court case was thrown out when a police officer's body cam showed him planting drugs before 'finding' them immediately after. Now prosecutors in Maryland are reviewing other body-cam footage and have already thrown out 34 criminal cases with many more under review:
The Baltimore Police Department's body cams, like many across the nation, capture footage 30 seconds before an officer presses the record button. The footage was turned over to defense attorneys as part of a drug prosecution - and that's when the misdeed was uncovered.
[...] "We are dismissing those cases which relied exclusively on the credibility of these officers," Mosby told a news conference Friday. She said the dismissed cases, some of which have already been prosecuted, involved weapons and drugs.
Lesson learned cops - plant drugs, wait 30 seconds, then turn on the camera!
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Tuesday August 01 2017, @02:28PM
The components you select for this device would probably include dedicated encoding HW support, e.g an iMx6 on a reference board will live encode/stream 720p at 1Mbps in a 6W envelope [ridgerun.com]. I suspect that's actually more efficient than trying to get the CPU to do something in pure software.
So, a back of the envelope calculation says that 720p30@1mbps will take about a Meg every 8 seconds, or 7.5 Meg a minute, call it a half gig every hour.
And so a 60Wh Li pack would give you a nominal 5 hour runtime, with 2.5Gig of memory for storage. (and up to 10hrs/5G in an emergency where you don't worry about deep discharge).
You could almost certainly do a lot better with a proper HW design (e.g. low power variant of the iMx, better custom board, etc etc) and you'd lose some lifetime for a "good" camera, but this is certainly not a technical problem.