Pueblo Police explain how long they keep body cam footage

are capturing thousands of videos every week on their body cameras. but most of that footage eventually gets deleted. tonight do newschannel 13’s michelle san miguel is finding out how police decide what to keep. she joins us live outside of the police department. police say they simply cannot keep all of the video that’s recorded because they don’t have the space. if they exceed their storage space, they say that expense would be passed down to taxpayers. nat pop — a prowler. a warrant. a noise disturbance. at the end of every shift, officers upload their body camera footage into this database — each video is assigned a category that determines how long it will be kept. for example — traing videos like this one are stored for 30 days. other recordings are kept much longer. 11:36:12 every video that we take of a felony crime that’s been recorded will be retained for a minimum of 3 years. There are some exceptions to that. deputy chief davenport says cases like officer- involved shootings, including the most recent one near the praise assembly of god church in january, will be kept indefinitely. deciding what video stays and what goes is determined by the statute of limitations. 1:36 the statute of limitations has a correlation with seriousness of the offense. retired judge victor reyes says preserving digital evidence is a must especially if lawsuits are filed. 3:31 if there’s somebody who is shot and killed, or injured, they always have an option, depending on the circumstances, of filing a lawsuit against the police department, against the officer. Nat pop of body cam being turned on and while turning on the cameras may be as simple as the push of a button — police say only two administrato rs have the authority to delete them. 11:37:25 no officer has the ability in and of themselves to delete anything. This is all deletions that are preset. pueblo police have the ability to store 9.9 terrabytes of video every year. they’ve already used u a third of the space but they tell me they’re not worried about going over that limit. in pueblo, msm. krdo. nc13. in colorado springs… body cameras