AI in policing: Brazil
Every documented deployment of artificial intelligence by law enforcement in Brazil currently recorded on this site, drawn from the deployment tracker. Each entry is tied to a published source and carries the date it was last checked.
Deployments
BR São Paulo Municipal Guard / city government Live Facial Recognition Operational
- Legal basis
- Not established in sources reviewed; Brazil's LGPD is the general data protection law but no specific authorising instrument was found
- Oversight
- None identified; the city publishes a live public arrest tally outside the monitoring centre
Municipal (not police-force) live facial recognition across roughly 40,000 street, public-building and voluntarily-enrolled private cameras, alerting a monitoring centre staffed by police officers when a match against judicial fugitive databases reaches 90%+ confidence. Costs around $2m/month. Official transparency reports analysed by AFP show more than 8% of people identified and arrested as fugitives in the system's first year had to be released due to errors; most arrests occurred in outlying neighbourhoods among migrants from poorer regions. As of March 2026, roughly 3,000 fugitives caught via the system, with nearly 4,000 more caught in the act. The published 8% wrongful-arrest rate is the most specific error figure found for any live FR system's operator, more precise than the Met's 'one false alert' or BTP's 'zero true matches'.
Source: AFP via France 24; Christian Science Monitor · last checked 2026-08-24
BR Rio de Janeiro Military Police (CICC) Live Facial Recognition Operational
- Legal basis
- Not established in sources reviewed
- Oversight
- None identified
State military police (distinct operator from São Paulo's city-run Smart Sampa) running facial recognition cameras via the Integrated Command and Control Center, scanning passers-by against outstanding arrest warrants and dispatching the nearest patrol on a match. Expanded before Aug 2026 with 1,300 police-car-mounted cameras using Dahua software scanning faces and plates; a police major stated plans to extend to body-worn cameras later in 2026 -- the clearest documented case of vehicle-mounted mobile facial recognition at fleet scale found in this research. Documented misidentifications in Brazil since 2020 include a Black woman arrested in Rio (2019, mistaken identity), a woman detained in Rio (Jan 2024) after the database showed her as a fugitive while she was already serving her sentence, and a Black man wrongfully detained 26 days in Bahia over a decade-old robbery by someone else. Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice records 506 AI-driven FR systems adopted in Brazil as of March 2026, with projected reach to ~87 million people.
Source: Christian Science Monitor; Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice · last checked 2026-08-25