$3.5 Million a Year to Store the Video a 2020 Law Now Generates

In 2020, Colorado passed SB20-217, requiring every local police agency and the state patrol to put body-worn cameras on officers.▸ The mandate took full effect on July 1, 2023. The bill was written to fix an accountability problem — footage of police encounters, on record. It also did something the legislature didn't budget for at the time: it turned every police stop into a video file that a prosecutor must review, store, and hand to the defense, and a public defender must review right back. Three years in, the state's own budget staff and criminal-justice agencies are tallying what that costs, in both money and hours.

Colorado's First Judicial District Attorney's Office — Jefferson and Gilpin counties, under District Attorney Alexis King — received 67,000 videos in 2025, totaling nearly 42,000 hours of footage, according to CBS News Colorado's reporting on the office's own data.▸ That's an 83% increase in video volume over three years. Dashcam, doorbell, drone, and cell-phone extractions add to the pile, but body-worn camera video — required from roughly 14,000 sworn officers statewide since SB20-217 took effect — is the largest single source. The office has reassigned 25 staff members to process it and spends $200,000 a year on the software licenses just to manage the files.

Colorado law requires prosecutors to share evidence with the defense within 21 days of a defendant's first appearance or face court sanctions.▸ CBS News Colorado reports that missed deadlines tied to the sheer volume of video have already produced sanctions in individual cases. James Karbach, director of legislative policy at the Colorado State Public Defender's office, put it to CBS News Colorado plainly: the backlog is "a threat to the administration of justice."

The Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD) — the state agency that represents defendants who can't afford a lawyer — built a dedicated video-storage system starting in fiscal 2023, appropriated at $4.1 million as a one-time capital project called "Public Defense in the Digital Age."▸ That system alone wasn't the end of the cost. For fiscal 2026, OSPD requested an additional $1.56 million, ongoing, just to keep paying for storage growth under its vendor contract. Colorado's Joint Budget Committee staff project that annual line will keep climbing — to $2.1 million in FY2026-27, $2.9 million in FY2027-28, and $3.5 million in FY2028-29 — without any new law changing what has to be stored.

Prosecutors and public defenders aren't the only ones paying for it.▸ The Colorado Judicial Department runs a separate appropriation — "ACTION and Statewide Discovery Sharing Systems" — that moves discovery, including video, between law enforcement, prosecutors, and defense statewide. It cost $3.24 million in FY2022-23, rose to $3.305 million the next year, and has held at $3.49 million for both the current fiscal year and the one requested after it. Flat, but flat at a level nearly $250,000 higher than where it started three budget cycles ago — and none of these three appropriations (OSPD storage, the discovery-sharing system, one district attorney's software licenses) is drawn from the same fund or covers the same agencies. Colorado has at least three separate, growing line items paying to move the same underlying video around its criminal-justice system.

The state noticed the pattern before this reporting did.▸ In the same budget cycle, OSPD and the Office of Alternate Defense Counsel — backed by the Colorado District Attorneys' Council, the prosecutors' own statewide association — jointly asked the legislature to fund a task force just to study how to control these costs. Lawmakers responded with SB25-240, creating a 13-member Electronic Discovery in Criminal Cases Task Force that was due to report findings to the Joint Budget Committee and the Joint Technology Committee by November 1, 2025. Notably, the bill required no new appropriation to convene it — the task force itself was built to run on "existing resources," the same resource base that produced the numbers above.

Figures in this piece come from Colorado's own budget process (Joint Budget Committee staff estimates, which are projections, not locked appropriations) and from CBS News Colorado's reporting on data supplied by one district attorney's office, which may not represent every Colorado county. Both point the same direction, from independent sources: the cost of storing mandatory video evidence is compounding faster than any one agency's budget request captures.