C4 Command Centre & the 123 Emergency Line
Bogotá's district security secretariat runs the C4 command centre, which moved into its purpose-built site off Calle 20 in 2016 and houses the 123 emergency line that merged the city's separate police, fire, health and traffic numbers back in May 2007. The city says it now watches about 13,000 public and private feeds from the C4 and ten control rooms inside police stations, and has added licence-plate recognition and BriefCam analytics that it says compress hours of recording into minutes. It does not publish how many of those feeds it owns — the district's own fleet stood at 5,824 cameras in 2026. Auditors keep finding that fleet dark: 1,367 of those cameras were out of service in May 2026, and the Contraloría found roughly 45% down under the 2021-2023 maintenance contracts.
📊 Impact
1,367 of 5,824 district-owned cameras (23.5%) were out of service in May 2026, per a right-of-petition response released by councillor Diana Diago — worst in Los Mártires (35.9%) and Santa Fe (32.9%). The Contraloría de Bogotá earlier found about 45% of the same 5,824 cameras out of service under the 2021-2023 maintenance contracts, and set fiscal findings of COP 5,379M for duplicate payments and charges for maintaining cameras that were already dead.
🎓 Lesson
Integration is cheaper to announce than maintenance is to perform. Bogotá added 1,676 feeds in two years while roughly a quarter of the cameras it already owned sat dark, and no published evaluation — academic, audit or police — says whether any of it moves crime, clearance rates or response times.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “C4 Command Centre & the 123 Emergency Line” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-c4-command/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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