Cameras have quietly become one of the City of Cape Town’s most relied-upon policing tools, and the rollout is about to get a lot bigger. As reported by CapeTownETC, the City is pushing ahead with a major expansion of its body-worn, vehicle-mounted and fixed CCTV camera network, as part of a broader push to give officers on the ground, and the control room watching over them, more eyes on what’s happening in real time.
The City is adding 750 new body-worn cameras for Metro Police, Law Enforcement and Traffic Services staff, taking the total planned rollout to 3 000 units. Roughly 2 250 devices are already active across the metro, according to the City of Cape Town.
Those cameras aren’t just for show. The City says footage has been pulled for internal disciplinary reviews or handed over to the South African Police Service more than 450 times, used both to build cases against suspects and to check officers’ own conduct when complaints come in against them.
Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security JP Smith framed the devices as a safeguard that cuts both ways, protecting officers and the public alike during tense interactions on the ground. The units also stream live, letting officers push footage straight through to the City’s operations centre while an incident is still unfolding rather than only after the fact.
That real-time link proved useful during the unrest that broke out on 30 June, when officers responding to affected areas were able to beam live body-camera footage back to the operations centre as events developed.
Vehicle-mounted technology is growing alongside body cameras. Another 25 enforcement vehicles are due to be fitted with automatic number-plate recognition systems, which will lift the City’s total fleet running the tech to 555 vehicles.
The system flags vehicles of interest automatically, tying number-plate sightings back to open investigations without an officer needing to spot and check a plate manually.
The scale of what the network is picking up is significant. Over the twelve months to the end of June, the City’s CCTV system logged 41 005 incidents, which fed into 541 arrests, an 18% jump on the year before. Drug offences made up the bulk of that total: 228 arrests for possession and 21 for dealing, alongside 91 for traffic-related offences, 19 for theft from vehicles and 16 for cable or metal theft.
