Hessen Police

Hessen Police states its system compares the biometric facial characteristics of a specifically wanted person against people appearing in designated video-protection zones, to locate that person, a missing person, or a victim in defined circumstances. Non-matches are stated to be deleted immediately, and matches are reviewed by police personnel rather than acted on automatically. This is Germany's first entry on this tracker.

Correction and detail, verified August 2026. The start date is 10 July 2025, not 2026: the Hessian Interior Ministry confirmed Frankfurt police began biometric real-time remote identification in the Bahnhofsviertel on that date, making Hesse the first German federal state to deploy live facial recognition. Reporting cited by hessenschau put the deployment at around 50 cameras in that district.

The statutory scope is narrower than a standing watchlist model. Section 14(9) HSOG permits targeted search for a specific person only where necessary to avert an actual and present or actual and foreseeable danger, a terrorist offence, or to search for victims of kidnapping, human trafficking or sexual exploitation, or for missing persons recorded in police information and search systems. Section 14(8) additionally allows an individual already flagged by pattern-recognition alerting to be identified where there is danger to life or limb. Use must be limited in time and place to what is strictly necessary, judicial authorisation is required in principle, and each use must be logged.

How the legal basis arose is itself contested and worth recording: the facial recognition and pattern-recognition powers were added to the Bill by a short-notice amendment on 5 December 2024, after the public expert hearing on the legislation had already taken place on 12 November 2024. Critics including netzpolitik.org note that Hessian video surveillance is not confined to statistically crime-affected locations but may also cover police-defined 'Angstraeume' (spaces perceived as unsafe), and raise the standard accuracy-disparity objection that facial recognition produces more errors for women and people of colour.

Update, November 2026. netzpolitik.org (22 April 2026) reports from Frankfurt that the live system has run in the Bahnhofsviertel since July 2025 as a pilot; of 70 public-space cameras in Frankfurt, 29 are in the district and 19 of those are suitable for facial recognition. It reports that only a low double-digit number of persons have been searched for since July 2025, with one successful search (a missing 16-year-old), and that the police have also used a mobile face-matching app since December 2025, installed on 160 devices so far, which compares faces against the Federal Criminal Police Office's system. An evaluation phase is reported as planned from July 2026. The Hessian Green parliamentary group has challenged the 2025 provisions before the state constitutional court (Staatsgerichtshof), and two plaintiffs supported by the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte have sued at the Frankfurt administrative court asking it to refer the provisions to the Federal Constitutional Court. The state data protection commissioner, Alexander Roßnagel, is reported to be preparing an opinion on the app. Frankfurt police keep the development costs of the app and of the real-time system secret, and no vendor is named. netzpolitik.org describes the live system as a pilot project ("Pilotprojekt"); its August 2025 report had described the deployment as not a test. No result of the evaluation has been reported.