North Carolina agency turns to body-worn camera system from VIEVU, Motorola Solutions

Duncan said he was especially impressed with the design of the VIEVU cameras, which include strategically placed ridges on the outer shell that let officers—even those wearing gloves—easily activate and shut off the video system.

“You lose a lot of fine and complex motor skills under stress, so a lot of defensive tactics and how we operate are based around using gross motor skills,” Duncan said. “With this camera, it’s a gross motor skill to turn it on and off—you don’t have to reach and find a small button to turn the camera on or turn the camera off.

“We really like the design of it. You sweep with the hand, and it basically moves half of the outer shell of the camera down and exposes the camera lens [to shoot video]. Then, when you’re done with the call, you simply push it back up. It’s about as gross of a motor skill and simple to operate as any product that we’ve seen, and that was a real selling point to me.”

Another feature of the VIEVU solution that Duncan noted was the system’s open architecture and the fact that it allows the county to store the video on its own servers.

With many other public-safety video solutions, “they’re proprietary, and they own your data,” Duncan said. “In other words, your data gets downloaded to a cloud, and you have to pay a storage fee. Basically, you never completely own your data, and we felt it was really important that the data that came in from those cameras belonged to the agency.”