São Paulo City Hall (Smart Sampa)

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'.

Update, November 2026. Correio da Manhã (20 October 2026), citing UOL, reports that Smart Sampa data was exposed online for about 11 months, allowing improper access to images from more than 58,000 cameras, including in schools, nurseries and hospitals. The city government confirmed the leak but denies a flaw in the system, attributing it to "um vazamento ilegal de dados" by one of its more than 7,500 authorised security staff, who has been removed from duties while the Guarda Civil Metropolitana's internal affairs unit investigates; the repository was taken offline, and the city says it has added exclusive passwords and two-factor authentication. The city says the system is overseen by the municipal audit court (TCM), that its contract requires periodic audits, and that it sends semiannual transparency reports to the public prosecutor's office. The same article cites a CESeC study that found identification errors in early 2025, which the city disputes. No suspension of the programme is reported.