Winning bid for NYPD body camera contract comes under lobbying attack | Hacker News Reader

Winning bid for NYPD body camera contract comes under lobbying attack

politico.com

Can no one at the NYPD or anyone employed by the city of New York do math? $6.4M for 5,000 cameras is close to $1,300 for each camera. WTF? Brand new flagship smartphones which have thousands of patents and countless additional features can be sold at profit for ~$700. You're telling me ONE feature of a smart phone with some slight modifications for the NYPD can't be obtained for a fraction of that cost? GTFO. These cameras should cost $150 a piece, not 8x that price or more.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tagging every cop in the country with a camera. But the cost is absurd and typical of our wasteful government.

This argument seems to ignore that the cost of production exhibits economies of scale. The consumer mass market has different margins from a niche industry, even if both produce cameras. A small company can't leverage nearly the same marginal utility that Apple or Samsung can.

I doubt that these body cameras are very different from dash board cams (except for a need for more battery power) technically. Dashboard cameras are ephemeral in some parts of the world and cheap _and_ a consumer mass market.

Even assuming that it's technically very different: there's ~1 million sworn police officers in the US according to Wikipedia. That quantifies as a mass market for me given the price segment.

"By way of comparison, at the weekend launch of iPhone 6s last Sept 25, Apple announced sales of over 13 million units across 3 days. In total, Apple sold 75 million iPhones in the launch quarter, the most it has ever sold."

If they sold a single batch of 1 million units to every police officer in the country, it would still not even be in the same league. 1 million total potential customers sold in small batches is not mass market.

[0]: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/16/editorial-sorry-an....

Yes, mass consumer devices have economies of scale that exceed VieVU's capabilities. No doubt about that. But that might account for 20% of the cost and at face value given what the article stated, the product seemingly costs many multiples of any reasonable fee.

Also, there should be some sort of economies of scale involved when VieVU is providing tens of thousands of cameras across the country. It's not just the NYPD.

I did some additional research and posted a follow up comment that sheds some light on the breakdown of the cost. It makes it more tolerable but still too expensive in my opinion.

20% isnt even close. Where did you get this number?

In my time working in hardware (across consumer devices like smartphones and specialized devices for industry) I have never seen a product with only a 20% difference between low volume and mass manufacturing costs. The difference is in the range of 200-1000% when talking about going from 10,000 to a million units, depending on manufacturing setup cost. The lower range is only achievable if your manufacturing line is uninterrupted which I doubt is possible for such small orders and it's impractical for a small government contractor to make many units all at once due to inventory costs and risk.

$200 at 10,000 units for a device that sells for $50 or $25 at a million units is par for the course for any hardware product.

Forget about the populist undertones and just take advantage of the opportunities.

If you do it right you'll be able to exempt yourself from the socioeconomic problems and oppressions in any one country.

Is the contract only for purchase or is it purchase and support? In the case of the former, yes it feels wasteful. In the latter? Not so sure.

Furthermore, does it include equipment for collecting, storing, and searching produced footage?

I posted a follow up while you were writing this. Check out that comment. TLDR - it most likely includes overpriced data storage.

Yup, I just saw that.

If it's just storage I definitely agree with you it's overpriced. But if it's storage, upload, and search... It's probably overpriced but I'd rather have someone who knows how to handle that problem doing it compared to the NYPD. Kinda how I can put a machine in a data center or I can use Heroku. The hardware in a data center is cheaper by a lot but if I can pay a premium to have something managed for me.

Since the majority of the population thinks $100 for an extra 16GB of storage in their phone is reasonable I'm not sure I would expect much better from people in office.

I did a little more digging around and something doesn't add up. VieVU advertises a $200 price tag for the camera and a $55 per month data storage fee per camera.

Doing some quick math with those assumptions, that works out to a 2 year contract with VieVU when data storage fees are considered.

That being said, I find $55 per month per camera an egregious data storage fee considering the cost of mass storage today. Clearly that is where VieVU's profit center is. They are marking up the data storage fee which goes on in perpetuity forever. Even if they delete data records after X months they are still always creating new ones that need storage so it never goes away and they bilk the taxpayer with these high fees.

The department should simply look elsewhere for data storage.

The storage charge is definitely where they plan to make the money but it's more than just a giant JBOD array for storing the videos (well it should be and if it isn't then it's a terrible contract). At the least it needs to be highly auditable and tamper proof. So in addition to the raw storage requirements there's support and maintenance on the WORM system and reporting and search systems that make the video reliable and available.

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