Grantville police request technology upgrades

The Grantville Police Department is seeking a server upgrade because of the large amounts of video its officers capture while on patrol.

Assistant Chief Cliff Schriefer and Officer Tad Masuoka gave a presentation on new equipment, new hardware and new software to the Grantville City Council at its Monday night work session.

The upgrades are intended to improve the police department’s video storage capabilities. According to Schreifer, the department currently has two 7-terabyte hard drives for video storage.

"Those two hard drives are filled up approximately every seven months, so we have to buy new drives, put them in place of the old ones and put the old ones in storage for evidence," he said.

Officers are downloading approximately 10.5 gigabytes of video per week from their body cams, consisting of traffic warnings, citations and arrests, Masuoka said.

The objectives are to improve the video download storage and production of DVDs for prosecution or FOIA requests, according to Masuoka.

The total upgrade will cost approximately $44,275, Masuoka said. The hardware upgrades include purchasing multiple computers so GPD officers have more than one to store video on and to allow officers to upload video from their cars, once they pull into the police department's parking lot.

"What we want to do is improve efficiency," he said. "Officers must use one computer, and investigators must use the same computer."

Masuoka said the police department is also requesting to have a separate network from the rest of Grantville's city hall.

According to the officer, Grantville City Hall uses a Windows 08 server, which is no longer able to receive security patches or updates. The police department would use a separate, newer server to better protect the data they accrue from viruses, malware and ransomware.

Depending on prosecutions, sentencing and the availability of appeals, the data collected by the police department could be stored for many years, Masuoka said. Otherwise, it will be purged from the server after 90 days.

The presentation included a request for new software to redact private information from footage released through FOIA requests. The software, WatchGuard Redactive, will blur faces, remove audio and censor private information as needed.

"Any video requested through FOIA must be reviewed prior to release," Masuoka said. "Any information that is redacted form printed material, such as personal information, must also be redacted form video."

According to Masuoka, the upgrades will allow GPD to improve its efficiency when storing and releasing data.

"The new software will allow us multiple connections and downloads at the same time. Retrieval will be much faster. It's more accurate, and we can classify things a bit better and we can start earmarking things that we don't have to hold on to for extended amounts of time in a timely fashion," Masuoka said.

City Manager Al Grieshaber said the city has the money in the bank available for the purchase.

"SPLOST funds can be used for the police department," he said. "They have been very diligently saving their SPLOST funds, so I suspect this may be the appropriate purchase for those funds because there certainly is a need."

Grantville Police Chief Steve Whitlock said the server upgrades were necessary for the police department to protect the city from potential lawsuits.

"This day and time, if you don't see it, then most of the time it didn't happen,” Whitlock said. “Everybody wants to see a video, so we're trying to stay up to date. The last thing we're trying to see happen is the city get sued. This is a necessity.”

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