Overview
- Installation work started at Kottbusser Tor on Sunday with about 30 high-resolution Axis cameras being linked to behaviour-analysis software from the private firm Adesso for a calibration phase before production use.
- The system will keep normal video that shows faces for up to one month and, under the revised Berlin police law, officers may extract faces from recordings for identification after an alarm is raised.
- Berlin’s interior administration awarded the contract to Adesso and plans further tests at Warschauer Brücke this year and at Alexanderplatz and Görlitzer Park next year, with officials estimating roughly €2.5 million in investment and €2.1 million in operating costs to 2030.
- Residents, local politicians and privacy experts say they were not properly informed and warn the project risks criminalising marginalized people, while no independent evaluation of Berlin’s pilot has been planned and past tests in Hamburg produced about 1,400 alerts over two months with only 11 deemed relevant and at least one missed brawl.
- The move makes Berlin the third German city after Mannheim and Hamburg to deploy street-level behaviour scanners and reflects a broader push by state and federal authorities to equip police with AI tools, a change that could shift policing priorities and accelerate surveillance-driven interventions in public space.