Cape Town is developing a new 8,000m² policing operations centre designed to bring officers, surveillance systems and safety technology together for faster responses to crime.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis visited the Joint Public Safety Operations Centre (JPSOC) in Goodwood with Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security JP Smith to assess progress on the facility.
The centre will serve as a central coordination hub for the City’s policing resources and its growing network of public safety technology.
This will include CCTV surveillance, drones, body-worn cameras, in-vehicle cameras, automatic number plate recognition technology and digital communication platforms.
Artificial intelligence and automation will also form part of the system.
“I was excited to see progress on our new policing nerve centre today, which is almost ready to roll as the major new coordination hub for City policing and safety technology,” Hill-Lewis said.
“This is the next big step forward in making Cape Town safer for everyone.”
The City says it has added 1,300 policing personnel during the current term of office, bringing its complement to more than 3,800 officers.
The JPSOC is intended to enable these resources to be coordinated alongside technology providing officers and control-room personnel with information from across the metro.
Hill-Lewis said the facility would also strengthen cooperation between City policing services and the South African Police Service.
“This major new operations centre will coordinate expanded policing efforts, making the City an even stronger partner to SAPS in the fight against crime,” he said.
The City is approaching the deployment of 3,000 body-worn cameras, while 530 enforcement vehicles are equipped with in-vehicle cameras featuring Automated Number Plate Recognition functionality.
Officers can increasingly stream live footage from mobile cameras to operations centres, alongside information generated by drones, CCTV and number plate recognition systems.
The City’s Metro Police Strategic Surveillance Unit detected 41,005 incidents through CCTV during the 2025/26 period, resulting in 541 arrests.
According to the City, this represented an 18% increase in arrests compared with the previous year.
Smith said integrating the different technologies would provide officers with a stronger real-time picture of incidents unfolding across Cape Town.
“The various safety tech solutions we’ve introduced help create a real-time operational picture to improve situational awareness and inform decision-making,” he said.
“We are now at a point where officers can stream live feeds to our operations centre from their mobile cameras, augmented by drone, ANPR and CCTV footage.”
The City has also recorded a 35% increase in requests from SAPS to access its footage for potential use in investigations.
Smith said expanding the surveillance and digital coordination network could increase the amount of evidence available to investigators and potentially support successful prosecutions.
The new Goodwood facility is expected to consolidate these systems into a central operations environment as Cape Town expands its technology-supported approach to public safety.
