By Julie Anderson, principal of AG Strategy Group.

As the nation debates recent incidents of alleged police misconduct in Baltimore and across the country, one proposed solution is offered repeatedly: equip officers with body-worn cameras. In an important step toward this goal, the Department of Justice announced in early May that the first $20 million of the proposed $75 million in federal funding will be made available through a body-worn camera pilot program. The program will match state funding for 50,000 cameras nationwide.

Many cities, such as Topeka, Daytona Beach, and San Diego, have already deployed body-worn cameras. But capturing footage of police interactions with the public isn’t enough.

Another major challenge facing police departments, beyond financing the programs, is keeping the footage and data safe and secure. With that in mind, local and state authorities should look to recently updated FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) policies for guidance on these significant issues.

These body cameras ? along with the increase of video surveillance systems ? are creating mass amounts of data that agencies need to manage, store and secure.

The Seattle Police Department alone produced over 360 terabytes of data from dashboard cameras. And much of the concern about deploying cameras focuses on funding for purchasing and maintaining storage.

The police department in Duluth, Minnesota was able to afford the $5,000 purchase price of cameras, but struggled with the $78,000 data storage fees for the first two years of operation.

In addition to financing these data storage systems, law enforcement agencies have other critical responsibilities when deploying a safe and responsible body-worn camera program. The way data is stored should not be overlooked. With cyber hacking on the rise, law enforcement agencies and citizens should be particularly wary of protecting sensitive video footage from unwanted incursions and bad actors.

Law enforcement agencies must secure the data more effectively in order to protect the privacy of individuals. Legislatures and city councils should require police departments to address privacy issues at the outset. While safe and secure data storage comes with a cost, it is an investment we need to make.

The good news is that the FBI has done a lot of work in this area by updating its CJIS guidelines last fall. The policies prescribe methods of data collection, transmission, storage, and destruction to establish a standard level of data protection.

The security standards are designed to protect the security of criminal justice information in cloud systems. Under the guidelines, cloud providers are required to protect information such as fingerprints and facial recognition data as it is shared among law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels.

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