Overview
- Under a new Green–CDU coalition agreement, the state plans a pilot that pairs behavior analysis with live face recognition in Mannheim and two other cities.
- The plan includes real‑time remote face identification and a tool to search for faces on the internet, which would require amending Baden‑Württemberg’s police law.
- The coalition proposes dropping the need to show a high crime rate before installing the systems, letting each municipality decide whether to deploy them.
- Human‑rights experts say the tools monitor everyone in view, can mark routine acts like lingering or unusual movement as suspicious, and may reinforce biases such as racial profiling.
- The push follows years of behavior‑scanning tests in Mannheim and live face matching in Frankfurt, with Hamburg adopting the scanner and several states drafting similar laws as local groups begin to organize protests.