The bodycam footage exploded. The 21-day clock didn't move.

Far more than most people outside the system picture. A mid-grade felony such as an aggravated burglary that once arrived with 3–4 recordings now routinely comes with 50–60 — roughly a 1,400% increase. A vehicular-homicide file that in 2017 might have held 79 photos and no video can today carry 362 photos and 90+ hours of body-worn and dashcam footage. Even minor misdemeanors now commonly generate around a terabyte of digital evidence.

At Jefferson County, each felony attorney carries roughly 100 cases, and each case averages 4–6 hours of body-worn footage alone — so an attorney can be responsible for reviewing 400–600 hours of video to confirm nothing was missed. As DA Alexis King described it: "Each of our attorneys is responsible for reviewing 400 hours of video to ensure nothing is missing within 21 days of a case being filed."

The biggest driver is the multi-camera multiplier. A single 45-minute DUI stop used to mean one officer, one bodycam, one dashcam. Today, once backup arrives, that same scene can involve four or five officers — each with a bodycam — plus four or five dashcams, turning a 45-minute incident into four-plus hours of footage that all has to be reviewed to prosecute one case. Durango DA Sean Murray summed up the trend: case counts have actually fallen over the past couple of decades, but "the amount of time an attorney spends on a case has gone up dramatically."

Each camera is its own recording, and agencies rarely run one unified system. Different departments use different vendors — Axon, VIEVU, legacy on-premise systems — and those systems don't talk to each other. The result is a pile of separate, unsynchronized files covering the same minutes from different angles, which a prosecutor has to stitch together mentally while watching them one at a time.

A staggering amount. Durango's police department had accumulated about 88 terabytes of footage since 2018 — the equivalent of roughly 29 million smartphone photos; viewed one second at a time, that's about 11 months of continuous watching for one person. Its primary footage server, at 56 terabytes, was essentially full, forcing a migration from on-premise storage to the cloud. On the prosecution side, Colorado DA infrastructure first built in 2015 for about $3 million now costs roughly $750,000 a year just to maintain — and is expected to climb as volume grows.

That's the heart of the crisis. Colorado law requires discovery to be turned over within 21 days. With 400–600 hours of video per attorney per cycle, simply watching it all would take roughly 19–28 hours a day — an impossible workload. The Colorado Senate stood up an eDiscovery task force in 2025 that concluded the problem is serious enough it "could threaten the 'functioning of a fair justice system.'"

Because the files are enormous and the clock is running. Prosecutors and defense attorneys often have to download massive videos before they can even begin reviewing, and download time eats directly into the discovery deadline. As defense attorney Justin Bogan put it, the time it takes to download "has an extra weight… It's not a mild inconvenience, it's a delay — sometimes one with very important consequences for everyone involved."

Defense teams are downstream — they receive the evidence last and often lack the resources to process it as fast. The concern is a litigation advantage driven by resources rather than facts. Defense attorney Karbach framed it directly: "Arguably, everybody doesn't have the same ability to prepare. They might be able to prepare something in two hours that now takes us 40 hours. It's a fundamental fairness problem." Premium camera-vendor subscriptions make access easy for some offices and laborious for others — what Colorado DA Council head Tom Raynes called "the haves and the have-nots in terms of funding."

Not safely. Prosecutors have an obligation to review the evidence and disclose what's material — including anything favorable to the defense — and you can't know what a recording contains without examining it. A missed moment can unravel a charging decision, a plea, or a conviction. The realistic answer isn't reviewing less; it's reviewing smarter, with tools that triage the volume and surface the moments that matter so attorneys spend their time on judgment instead of scrubbing.

Earlier analyses — like the widely cited 2018 study — focused on camera capabilities, redaction labor, privacy, and chain of custody, with data volume treated as a growing concern and per-case video measured in minutes. The 2026 reality is different in kind, not just degree: per-case video is now measured in hours, mid-grade felonies carry 50–60 recordings, multi-camera scenes multiply footage several-fold, and the strain has moved from "expensive and inconvenient" to a structural threat to meeting legal deadlines and preserving fair-trial fairness.

Based on the 2026 picture, offices need: intelligent triage and prioritization; AI summarization that watches the footage and flags what matters; multi-camera sync that turns four or five files of one scene into a single timeline; combined audio transcription and visual analysis; discovery automation to package relevant portions ahead of the 21-day deadline; search across a case's full body of footage; vendor-agnostic ingestion that normalizes Axon, VIEVU, and local systems; and approaches that work over slow connections — so capability isn't gated behind the most expensive subscription.

BodyCam Analytics is built for exactly this problem. You upload footage from any source and get back a synced, searchable transcript — audio and visual — with every key moment flagged, multiple cameras of the same scene aligned to one timeline, and direct answers to the review questions you care about. Instead of scrubbing hundreds of hours, your team jumps straight to what matters, documents it as work product, and packages it for discovery — faster, documented, and ready to present. Try it on real clips →

No — and it isn't meant to. You still review the evidence, and the judgment stays with your prosecutors; the tool just makes the review faster and turns it into work product. It transcribes and indexes every recording so you reach each key moment directly, search every word, and capture what you find in bookmarks, notes, and issue and witness lists as you go — so every minute counts and nothing is missed.

Treat them as an accelerator, not a substitute for your own review. Transcripts are AI-generated, and the visual descriptions are written to be factual and neutral — describing what is visible, not intent. Verify any quote against the source footage before you rely on it. The original AI text is preserved alongside any edits, so the record stays transparent — useful when the accuracy of the record itself is at issue.