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Behavioral scanner in Berlin: roundabout of control
One living space, 30 cameras. And software that constantly checks whether everyone present is behaving as desired. Automated continuous monitoring began last week at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin
Deutsch (original) ·Auto-translated to English
One living space, 30 cameras. And software that constantly checks whether everyone present is behaving as desired. Automated continuous monitoring began last week at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin. How does it change the place?
Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, end of October, the day afterOpening ceremony for AI-supported video surveillance. Now the behavioral scanner is armed.
There is a mattress on the sidewalk and a person in a camouflage parka on it. He peels himself out of his sleeping bag and stands up. He grabs a bottle lying around and bends forward to urinate in it while passers-by hurry past him. A police van stops right next to him.
Then the traffic light turns green, the van moves on and the man lies down again. Another man sits on a stone edge next to beer and schnapps and fails to roll a cigarette. A dog barks. A man shouts “Yes brother”. Another whispers “Hashish?” A woman shouts into her phone: “You want escalation, you want everything to break!” Rap sounds from a boombox and techno from a kebab shop.
Is the behavior scanner working now?
Kottbusser Tor is a roundabout around a subway station, one subway crosses it underground, one leads over it on stilts. Between the access roads: paved areas on residential buildings. Shops on the ground floor, many of them restaurants.
A few people are sitting at a subway entrance, and around 20 others are standing in front of it in groups of two or three or alone. Drizzle, hoods, shadows in the dim street light.
A man in a wheelchair arrives at the area. He is greeted and some people gather around him. The wheelchair user opens a backpack and there are medicine boxes inside. The sight causes unrest. A young woman with a clouded look tries to reach into the bag. A man pushes her shoulder. The woman tries to fight off his arm.
Is the behavior scanner working now?
A very special video surveillance system
A very special video surveillance system has been running at Kottbusser Tor since October 28th. 30 cameras document what is happening on the square - and software searches the images in real time for movements that indicate crimes. The behavioral scanner presents suspicious scenes to human monitors, who can then dispatch emergency services. After Mannheim and Hamburg, Berlin is also a front-line city for automated control of streets and squares.
The behavioral scanner is just one of a number of AI-supported surveillance tools that security authorities around the world are currently rolling out on a large scale at a rapid pace - while they are still being developed. In Germany, too, many politicians rely on tools that automatically put people in the spotlight of police suspicion.
In addition to behavioral scanners, police systems will also be used at German train stations and in many German city centers that analyze all faces and compare them with a list. Security authorities should also search for biometric data on the Internet and use software like that produced by Palantir: which links databases and creates and evaluates profiles of people in fractions of a second.
This time there is no access
The scramble at Kottbusser Tor breaks up. The aggressive woman retreats to the other side of the street, the man in the wheelchair distributes the medication by the blister in exchange for money. Shortly afterwards, a group of police officers with stab-proof vests run out of the station in Kottbusser Tor in the direction of the suspected addicts - but then turn off and get into a police van, which drives away.
Either the short altercation was not adequately captured by the cameras - because it took place outside the recording area or was poorly lit, for example - or the situation was classified as uncritical - by the software or the officer on duty.
The people who are filmed at Kottbusser Tor never know whether the software will attribute an offense to them, whether they are being watched, or whether they will have to expect police action. They also don't know how to behave so as not to arouse suspicion.
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Preliminary suspicion instead of presumption of innocence
Automated surveillance pushes the boundaries of police work well into the run-up to a crime. The new tools are used to check completely inconspicuous everyday situations in order to generate suspicion. However, this comprehensive preliminary suspicion clashes centrally with the presumption of innocence, a basis of our more or less enlightened society.
The voluntary nature of donating data to the behavioral scanner is at least questionable. The signs that the police have to use to point out automated surveillance are a little over DIN A4 in size. Not everyone who travels here has seen them or the cameras - and the fact that their data may be used to train surveillance software is not even mentioned on the signs.
The example of naivety is given by four men in their mid-20s. They sit on plastic chairs in front of a Späti and drink beer. One of them works in a craft business here at Kottbusser Tor. When asked about the cameras hanging on the opposite wall of the house, they react in surprise. “Huh, how?”, “Crazy,” “What’s that supposed to mean?”, “Completely condescending,” “It’s a total surveillance state,” they say. And: “I want to be asked before I’m filmed,” “No fans,” “Boo!”
Addiction as a product of capitalism?
One of the young men, Jakob, speculates that the video surveillance is primarily aimed at drug addicts, those who are already living in misery. Their living situation is a product of capitalism, which automatically means that some people are always disadvantaged. Another, Freddy, expresses his fear of what a possible Federal Chancellor Alice Weidel could do with such a tool.
“I’ll go home and get a ladder and a hammer,” says Jakob and gets up. Then he laughs and just goes to the Späti to get more beer. The others laugh and clink glasses.
The Kottbusser Tor is a test laboratory for the acceptance of police measures. The area has been classified as a crime-ridden area for many years, which is why the police are allowed to check and search people there regardless of suspicion. Then 2023 became onehttps://www.berlin.de/polizei/dienststellen/landespolizeidirektion/direk...
Last year, the Kottbusser Tor was declared a knife-prohibition zone, and the police spent between 3,500 and 7,000 man-hours on the area every month. And now AI-powered video surveillance is adding to all the control pressure.
Spiral of surveillance
Apparently no measure has solved the problems so far, but rather each has only legitimized new measures. Control reproduces itself. Where there is a lot of suspicion, a lot is found, which makes the suspicion even more important. It is a kind of roundabout - like the Kottbusser Tor - a permanently rotating system. Or even more likely: a spiral. Like the driveway of the boarded-up parking garage at Kottbusser Tor. It also leads in circles, but always upwards - just like the monitoring logic, which inevitably carries with it the desire for the most up-to-date tools.
The success of the technologies is largely unclear. In Mannheim, even after eight years of training, the police cannot name a single case where the behavioral scanner helped prevent or solve a crime; in Hamburg, the few clues that the state released for a test run show thathttps://marx.wtf/2024/12/24/der-hansaplatz-experiment-war-no-success/">proHit 99 false positives.
Berlin should bring the breakthrough. This is not a non-profit Fraunhofer Institute, but an international onehttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/videoueberwachung-in-berlin-adesso-se-baut-...with video AI subsidiary
Who needs what
The Kottbus area is an ideal testing ground for such security policy toys. It is a space where many problems are evident. The public is correspondingly receptive to simple solutions. The law-and-order club is correspondingly attractive. But maybe the room needs something completely different? “Video surveillance doesn’t help people here,” says Jakob.
A neglected-looking man speaks to the four young beer drinkers. “Can I get one from someone, I’m really pumped.” When one of the boys readily picks up his shooting equipment, he says: “No, no filter.” And then gruffly: “I can do it myself,” as he reaches for someone else’s cigarette accessories.
Less than 20 meters away, a person is sitting hunched over on a gutter. Next to him, a urinal protrudes from the wall of the house. It smells accordingly. He holds a syringe between his legs - ageless face, fringed hair, worn-out sneakers, functional jacket. He rolled up his left trouser leg. He slowly sinks the needle into his lower leg. He draws a bit of blood and then pushes the plunger down in slow motion. Meanwhile, your head and upper body sink towards your knees. He freezes halfway up, with a syringe in his leg. A rat scurries past. Later, two patrolling police officers pass him.
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A shot in the spotlight
The scene is brilliantly lit. A row of spotlights hangs overhead on the wall of the house above the man. It runs along the back of the NKZ, the apartment block that encompasses the north side of the Kottbusser Tor. And every now and then there is a surveillance camera hanging in the row of headlights.
Red LEDs on the cameras show that they are in operation. The data flows through a cable harness that clearly connects cameras and headlights under a metal tube jacket. It leads to the police station at Kottbusser Tor. From there, the images are sent to a secret police property, where they are stored and analyzed by the behavioral scanner.
The software looks for patterns in the images that it found in training material. Roughly speaking, the more fights she was presented with, the better she is at recognizing others. In Berlin she was fed real and AI-generated scenes. “The training material includes scenes of exchanges of blows, kicks, violent pushing or pulling movements with ground contact, as well as scuffles at ground level,” writes a PR person commissioned by Staige. On the Staige website you can see a video that shows AI-generated scenes, some of which an AI in this promotional material identifies as violence.
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The surveillance AI is also trained with data from those being monitored
According to the Staige spokesman, the Berlin system will be further trained with the movement patterns of the monitored people on the Kotti as soon as the human AI supervisor confirms or rejects a displayed warning message. The movement pattern – as with gait recognition, for example – is definitely a unique identifier, a kind of fingerprint, highly personal information.
The data protection exception required for AI training - including permission to pass on data to manufacturers - was allowed by the outgoing black-red Berlin government coalition shortly before Christmas 2025, together with internet searches for biometric data - for example to identify people on video material - and Palantir-like software.
What happens next with these powers?https://netzpolitik.org/2026/koalitionshandlungen-in-berlin-rot-rot-g...the next Berlin governmenthttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/berliner-polizeigesetz-linke-und-gruene-zie...in the Police Act. Meanwhile, the SPD-led Senate Department for the Interior, together with the Berlin police, has established facts and started the behavioral scanner.
If Interior Senator Iris Spranger has her way, cameras should go to the Warsaw Bridge, the Red City Hall, the Interior Administration, the Jewish Museum this year, and then next year to Alexanderplatz, Görlitzer Park and the neighborhood around it. There is also critical infrastructurehttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/im-namen-der-sicherheit-berliner-senat-besc...Video surveillance permitted.
Magical thinking
Located right next to the dough ball factoryhttps://www.fixpunktggmbh.org/project/kontaktstelle-kotti-mit-drogenkons...Drug consumption room. What you bring with you is injected, snorted or smoked there under medical supervision. A bouncer lets individuals come through the door. Three men walk towards it together, two stay behind and wait. The father of the family frowns at her and other bystanders.
Apparently the illusion still works for him. But it's already late. He might want to lie down at some point. And according to specifications, the behavioral scanner then sends an alarm.
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