112 Downtown Cameras, and the Ten Face-Matching Ones That Never Switched On
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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In May 2024 Campo Grande announced 112 monitoring cameras for the central district under the special security secretariat (Sesdes) and the Guarda Civil Metropolitana, ten of them fitted for facial and licence-plate recognition, streaming in 4K. The plate half works; the face half does not. The municipal guard holds no image database of its own, so matching faces would mean drawing on Civil, Military and Federal Police records — which under Brazil's data protection act (LGPD) requires a formal agreement with the state justice and public-security secretariat. By January 2025 the ten cameras were still described as running 'apenas em fase de testes', with no agreement signed and no date set. In August 2026, as the network was extended to Rua 14 de Julho and the airport and bus-terminal approaches, the city stated plainly that 'o sistema não opera de forma automatizada' — operators watch the screens.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is press reporting; no primary evaluation was located. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →🎓 Lesson
The two recognition layers were bought together and diverged on legal grounds, not technical ones. Reading a number plate touches no personal-data regime, so the electronic perimeter in Agetran's control centre issues automatic alerts on stolen vehicles; the face-matching units beside them wait on a convênio. Meanwhile the state government has run facial recognition at the Expogrande fair, integrated with its own databases — so the capability plainly exists in the city, just not in municipal hands. Buying the sensor is the cheap part; acquiring the legal standing to use it is the project.
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Facial recognition on public cameras: what stopped it?
In four cities the cameras were already there and the face-matching layer was the question. Each was halted — by a different institution, on different grounds, and one of them was never switched on at all.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What stopped it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Surveillance Technology Ordinance & Facial Recognition BanSan Francisco, 🇺🇸 | 2019 | Live | Scaled back | Official | City government | not public | The city stopped itself: an ordinance barred its own departments from face recognition and made every other surveillance tool pass a council vote. |
| Buenos Aires's Fugitive Facial Recognition System, stopped by the courtsBuenos Aires, 🇦🇷 | 2019 | Suspended | Failed | Independent | City government | not public | A court stopped it — on the city's own security law and the oversight bodies it never convened, rather than primarily on data protection. |
| Algorithms on Nice's cameras: the carnival face test and the school-gate system the courts stoppedNice, 🇫🇷 | 2019 | Suspended | Failed | Independent | City government | not public | The regulator asked the city to measure its own error rates, the city could not, and the highest administrative court then ended the practice for every French municipality. |
| 112 Downtown Cameras, and the Ten Face-Matching Ones That Never Switched OnCampo Grande, 🇧🇷 | 2024 | Live | Scaled back | Media | City government | not public | Nothing stopped it, because it never started: the municipal guard holds no image database, and the data-sharing agreement was never signed. |
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “112 Downtown Cameras, and the Ten Face-Matching Ones That Never Switched On” — Campo Grande, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/campo-grande-camera-network-facial-recognition/ (last verified 2026-08-10). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.