Overview
- Berlin will begin a four‑week live pilot of AI‑assisted video surveillance at Kottbusser Tor in early November using 30 cameras at 15 positions to monitor the square around the clock.
- The system analyzes people’s movement patterns by reducing figures to simple skeletal outlines to spot acts such as blows, kicks or a person on the ground and sends live alerts to officers at a police watch station for human review.
- Police say officers see full‑resolution video after an alarm, recordings are encrypted in a Berlin police data centre under BSI guidance, and footage is kept about 28–30 days unless preserved as evidence.
- The rollout has prompted protests and a constitutional complaint from the Linke and Greens parliamentary groups, and the programme’s legal basis stems from a recent reform of Berlin’s security law.
- Key questions for the pilot are technical accuracy and false‑alarm rates—Hamburg tests showed very high false positives—and the results plus court and coalition decisions will shape any expansion to other hotspots like Warschauer Brücke, Alexanderplatz and Görlitzer Park.