Casablanca Urban Video Surveillance Network
A citywide CCTV network financed by Casablanca's own institutions - the Casablanca-Settat regional council, the city council and the local development company Casa Transport - but built and operated by the national police (DGSN), not the municipality. After a 2016 international tender (to Spain's COMSA-Sice) and a missed target of 3,000 cameras by 2020 (only about 600 were installed), the effort was recentralised around a central command and coordination post inaugurated at the Casablanca police prefecture on 7 April 2022: a 40-screen wall wired to 210 HD 360-degree cameras covering major arteries and junctions for traffic control and urban security, with a plan to expand toward roughly 650-700 cameras across about 330 sites. Primary coverage describes traffic and perimeter monitoring only; facial recognition, plate recognition and AI analytics are not documented for this fixed network. The budget escalated from an initial 460 million dirhams to roughly 1.2 billion. No independent evaluation of any crime-reduction effect exists; the only outside scrutiny is critical - Morocco's data-protection law (09-08) exempts security agencies from oversight.
📊 Impact
Operator-reported (DGSN, via the MIPA Institute): the command centre flagged about 129,704 suspicious cases in 2023 and says surveillance-directed patrols detected over 44,500 confirmed criminal acts, with 85,204 cases unresolved - self-reported activity counts, never independently audited, and not a measured change in crime.
🎓 Lesson
A camera network paid for by a city and its region but run by the national police, whose only public numbers are self-reported and whose enabling data-protection law exempts security agencies from any oversight - the classic 'safe city' accountability gap, where spend (460 million to 1.2 billion dirhams) and camera counts are documented but effect is not.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) · Digital twin
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Casablanca Urban Video Surveillance Network” — Casablanca, Morocco. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/casablanca-safe-city/ (last verified 2026-07-30). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.