The use of body cameras ushered in a new era of policing and judicial enforcement. And in the years following outcry over police brutality, the technology was made mandatory for agencies all over the U.S.
Body cameras became mandatory for all law enforcement officers in Colorado in 2023, although agencies in La Plata County had already adopted them years earlier.
The cameras have been a boon for prosecutors and law enforcement, providing a clear, second-by-second view of police activity that increases transparency, strengthens evidence and can disprove false allegations.
“I think everyone was scared of big brother watching when bodycams first came out, and now they’ve figured out that nine times out of 10, it’s saving them from false allegations and that kind of stuff,” La Plata County Sheriff Sean Smith said. “And I don’t think anybody minds it at all. ... everybody realizes it’s a great tool that helps them do their job better.”
But as recording becomes universal and video piles up, agencies and prosecutors across Colorado face an unintended consequence: a flood of digital evidence that can be overwhelming and difficult to manage, placing strain on attorneys working to meet discovery deadlines.
In 2025, the Colorado Senate established an eDiscovery task force to assess the technology, discovery systems and related laws statewide. The group concluded the issue poses a serious problem and could threaten the “functioning of a fair justice system.”
Durango Police Department Cmdr. Nick Stasi said that since the department first started using Axon’s body cameras in 2018, the department alone has amassed 88 terabytes of footage – the equivalent of roughly 29 million smartphone photos. It would take a single person 11 months to view each photo for a second.
That is a massive amount of data, which continues to grow every day as officers use their body-worn and dashboard-mounted cameras. Colorado Revised Statute 24-31-902 was signed into law in 2023, and required all law enforcement officers in the state to employ the use of body cameras.
Sean Murray, district attorney for the 6th Judicial District, said the sheer amount of footage captured by law enforcement agencies around the state is significantly increasing the amount of time attorneys in the 6th District spend on cases.
“While there has been a decrease in the number of criminal cases in our judicial district over the last couple decades, the amount of time an attorney spends on a case has gone up dramatically,” Murray said.
The reason is because when multiple law enforcement officers respond to a given call, they are each required to turn on their body-worn cameras. Add in the dashcams from police vehicles, which are activated whenever the emergency lights are turned on, and the amount of footage an attorney has to sift through increases drastically.
“We want to figure out exactly what happened,” Murray said. “There might have been lots of officers that responded (to a given incident), and all of them, by statute, have to activate their body-worn camera.”
Stasi agreed, saying the footage from one incident with multiple officers may compound on itself, which is in turn a problem for the DA’s office.
Stasi said DPD just renewed its $268,436 contract with Axon, a company that provides body dashboard and interview room cameras; video storage; AI software that transcribes and redacts the footage; tasers and taser cartridges; and a virtual reality training system. When body camera footage is captured, it is uploaded and categorized on DPD’s database on Evidence.com.
“So an officer might have a 45-minute video of a DUI,” Stasi said. “When we send it to the DA’s office, they have that officer’s video, they have every backup officer’s video and the dashcam videos from each one. So now all of a sudden, they have four hours of video for a 45-minute incident. That is going to be a complexity for prosecutors all over the state to figure out, ‘How do we watch all of this and manage all of this?’”
Murray said there is no easy answer. The big hurdle is money – the public defender’s office is funded through the state, while the DA’s office is funded through the counties within its jurisdiction – which, in the 6th District’s case, include La Plata, San Juan and Archuleta counties.
“I’m not sure how we’re going to improve that,” he said. “I don’t know that the solution is there financially.”
Murray said the state can’t send all the public defenders it wants to review bodycam footage. Similarly, the counties that make up the 6th Judicial District do not have the money to hire more attorneys at the DA’s office – particularly with La Plata County, the most populous in the district, facing budgetary challenges.
While the amount of footage that needs to be reviewed may prove to be a pain for prosecutors, Stasi said the technology has had a largely positive impact on law enforcement.
“Policing has changed dramatically,” he said. “I’ve been here 17 years. Just the technology we use, the expectations the community has. It’s different now than it ever was. But this technology, our officers are using it every day, and they love it.”
Stasi said the department has used body camera footage to discipline officers who acted out of line. On one occasion, the footage was used to disprove a person’s claim that an officer touched her inappropriately while she was searched during a DUI arrest.
“We went back and we watched the video, and it was clear as day that nobody touched her,” Stasi said. “Every angle was covered. He did an appropriate search, then put her in a car and immediately cleared any accusation that an officer had acted inappropriately and it protected everybody on scene that day.”
There are still some kinks that must be worked out, though. For instance, an officer might accidentally activate a body camera and add useless film to the database, or may walk into the bathroom to relieve themselves without turning their camera off.
Murray also pointed out that when an officer activates a camera, the camera will jump back 30 seconds before the activation. That gives a view into what happened directly before the camera was turned on. But, he said, audio is not captured until the initial activation.
“A lot of the times when we’re playing these body-worn cameras and dashcams in court, you can’t hear anything on the video for the first 30 seconds,” he said.
Another kink is the outdated server systems and download times that accompany the transport of gigabytes of data between agencies.
“If you’re a defense attorney, your client is expecting you to breathe life into her constitutional rights to fair trial and effective assistance of counsel,” said Justin Bogan, head of the Durango Public Defender’s Office.
Download speed can carry far greater consequences in trial preparation than it does for everyday internet use, he said.
“That time that it takes to download has an extra weight and adds to stress in a way that downloading a song or a video on your laptop doesn’t come close to,” he said. “It’s not a mild inconvenience, it’s a delay – sometimes one with very important consequences for everyone involved.”
A critical component of ensuring fair and just practices within the judicial system is the discovery process, which requires prosecutors to provide the defense with all evidence related to a case. In Colorado, district attorneys generally must turn over discovery within 21 days.
The deluge of electronic evidence has been identified as an added obstacle to meeting that deadline. The statewide eDiscovery task force report acknowledged that the growing volume of digital files can complicate prosecutors’ ability to comply on time.
“I think Mr. Murray can speak to those issues better than I can, but I don’t think the volume of video discovery has sped up the process,” Bogan said when asked whether the issue has been observed locally.
The Sheriff’s Office is preparing to overhaul how it stores and shares digital evidence, shifting from an on-premise WatchGuard server that is nearly out of space – about 56 terabytes and “essentially full” – to a cloud-based system, said Danielle Thurbur, LPCSO evidence director.
The goal is to streamline how prosecutors access case materials. Under the new system, the District Attorney’s Office will have a single landing page – described as a consolidated records view – where attorneys can see reports, digital evidence such as body-camera and in-car video, and logged physical evidence in one place.
Currently, prosecutors often must click multiple download links, wait for large files to transfer and manually organize materials while staff members field follow-up questions to confirm whether all evidence was provided.
“Because they have so many clicks on their side to be able to get it all into their file, it ends up causing rework for the agency as well as the District Attorney’s Office to make sure everything that’s been sent is actually on their side,” Thurbur said.
Murray said that at the end of the day, the footage is a beneficial thing on the court side as well. The adjustment to the new technology is just revealing some growing pains.
“It’s a good thing, right? Spending more time on a case, making sure that everything that is presented in legal arguments,” he said.
sedmonson@durangoherald.com
jbowman@durangoherald.com
