CCTV and Body-Cam Footage Request Log for Security Companies

A client asks whether last Tuesday's incident was caught on camera. The clip exists, somewhere: on an SD card, a laptop, a phone one of your guards used. Finding it, checking it's the right one, and getting it to someone safely takes half an afternoon you don't have.

What most firms do today

Footage sits wherever it was recorded: a CCTV system's own hard drive, a guard's phone, a USB stick in a drawer. Nothing connects it to the incident report it relates to, so proving what happened means finding the paperwork and the video separately and hoping they agree.

How TacDesk's footage system works

Everything lands in one library. Managers and admins upload video footage, in MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI or MKV, from CCTV systems, body-worn cameras or a guard's phone, with a description, a recording date and a camera source recorded against each clip. The library covers active footage and an archived tab, so old clips don't clutter the working list without being deleted outright.

Clips link to the reports they belong to. Open a report and attach the footage that covers it; one clip can be linked to more than one report, useful when a single camera catches something that ends up in several incident write-ups. Video streams in the browser, so a reviewer can jump straight to the moment they need instead of waiting for the whole file to download, and a manager can pull the original file down when they need a copy to hand over.

Client visibility is off until someone turns it on. A venue client using the client portal never sees a clip by default, even when it's linked to a report they can otherwise see. A manager releases it deliberately, and that release is recorded: who released it, and when. If it was released in error, the same action withdraws it; the earlier release stays on the record rather than disappearing, so there's always an audit trail of the decision either way.

Archived footage doesn't sit around forever. Once a clip is archived, TacDesk purges it automatically after 30 days, so old evidence doesn't quietly pile up as a storage cost or a data protection liability nobody's tracking.

A note on UK GDPR

Footage of an identifiable person is personal data. The Information Commissioner's Office does not set a single fixed retention period for CCTV; its guidance is the storage limitation principle, keep it no longer than you need it for, and check that in practice, not just in policy (ico.org.uk). If someone submits a subject access request for footage of themselves, the ICO's guidance is a response within one month, extendable in complex cases, and it flags that footage often needs redacting so other identifiable people aren't disclosed alongside them (ico.org.uk). TacDesk gives you a single place to find, review and release footage quickly when a request like that lands. It doesn't make those decisions for you, and it doesn't make your company GDPR compliant on its own: the retention period, redaction and disclosure judgement are still yours.

Why it matters

It turns "let me check" into an answer on the call. The clip and the report it belongs to are in the same place, so you're not promising to ring back once you've found it.

Client trust runs on what you can show, not what you can promise. Releasing footage deliberately, with a record of who did it and when, means you can prove exactly what you shared and why if it's ever questioned.

It keeps FOI and police requests separate from casual sharing. For those formal requests specifically, pair this with Third-Party Access Requests, which puts a justification form and an approval step in front of the link instead of an email attachment.

Where it sits

Footage Management is on every plan, TacFree included, so you don't need to be on a paid plan to start keeping video evidence next to your reports. See the pricing page for current details, and read more about how footage connects to write-ups on the incident reports page.

Start free to get your footage library running today, or book a demo if you want to see the release-and-withdraw workflow on a live account.