Queensland
Technology presence
What these categories mean
- ANPR
- Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR): camera systems that automatically capture, read, and log vehicle number plates with location and time, producing a searchable record of vehicle movements.
- Fixed cameras & RTCC
- Agency-operated fixed video cameras and the real-time crime centers (RTCC) that aggregate live and recorded feeds for monitoring.
- Face recognition
- Software that matches faces in images or video against a reference database to identify or verify individuals.
- Drones / UAS
- Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), commonly called drones, operated by an agency for overhead observation, imaging, or sensing.
- Gunshot detection
- Networks of acoustic sensors that detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert an agency.
- Body-worn & dashcam
- Officer body-worn and in-vehicle dashboard cameras that record encounters; public access to the footage is frequently restricted.
- Doorbell & camera registry
- Programs that give an agency access to privately owned camera footage: doorbell-camera partnerships, citizen camera registries, and private-camera integration platforms.
- Cell-site simulators
- Devices that mimic cell towers to locate or identify nearby mobile phones. They are often called Stingrays, or IMSI catchers after the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number that identifies each phone on a network. Adjacent: communications surveillance outside the visual/sensor core.
- Predictive policing
- Software that forecasts where crime may occur or who may be involved, to direct policing. Adjacent: analytics rather than a sensing deployment.
- Social-media monitoring
- Tools that collect and analyze public social-media activity for an agency. Adjacent: open-source/communications monitoring outside the visual/sensor core.
The record, by operator
Queensland Police Service
A Teledyne FLIR SkyRanger R70 joined the fleet in early 2023 after pilot training in December 2022. Remotely piloted aircraft entered operational use in Townsville and Cairns under a 12-month trial announced in February 2022 with close to $1 million in state funding, using DJI M30 aircraft for vehicle tracking and crime disruption. The service holds a CASA Remote Operator's Certificate with RPAS oversight under its aviation wing.
Sources: Government News, Queensland police to deploy drones (Feb 2022)Queensland Government ministerial statement, RPAS fleet expansion (Feb 2023)
QPS reported in September 2023 that the system, running on a cloud data platform, had assisted more than 1,000 cases including robberies, burglaries, sexual offences and domestic violence matters. QFACE, an in-house facial recognition system, compares suspect images against more than 10,000,000 photographs held in QPS databases, returning up to about 300 candidate matches for specialist officers to verify against other evidence.
Sources: iTnews, Qld Police builds cloud-enabled search and prediction tools (Sep 2023)
By September 2023, QPS described the model as a deployed capability on its cloud data platform. QPS reported a 56 percent reduction in incidents for a trial cohort. An in-house machine learning model trained on QPRIME administrative data, with ethnicity and location excluded as inputs, flags domestic violence perpetrators at high risk of reoffending so police can proactively visit them before further violence occurs.
Sources: ASPI The Strategist, AI and policing in Queensland (May 2022)iTnews, Qld Police builds cloud-enabled search and prediction tools (Sep 2023)The Conversation, Qld police will use AI to predict domestic violence (Sep 2021)
A $19.8 million investment announced in April 2022 expanded the fleet to 12,200 cameras, with newer Axon Body 3 units arriving first on the Gold Coast and in Ipswich. A statewide body-worn camera fleet grew to 7,700 by July 2019, covering all uniformed frontline officers, having reached 2,700 statewide in 2016 and about 300 Gold Coast devices in 2015. Queensland was the first Australian state to legislate when officers must activate their cameras.
Sources: iTnews, Queensland Police body cameras for all frontline staff (Jul 2019)Queensland Police Service, body worn camerasQueensland Government ministerial statement, camera fleet expansion (Apr 2022)
No more recent statewide fleet count is on record. A 2016 ministerial statement recorded 60 ANPR-equipped vehicles statewide across the Road Policing Unit, Tactical Crime Squads and Rapid Action Patrols, with more than 23 million plates read to that point. Automatic number plate recognition has been in use since a 2012 trial.
Sources: Queensland Government, ministerial media statement (Aug 2016)
Brisbane City Council Safety Camera Network
Footage is encrypted and retained for at least 31 days, or 36 months when tied to a recorded incident, and law enforcement requests flow through a dedicated channel separate from public information requests. Brisbane City Council's Safety Camera Network, which includes the CitySafe CBD and Fortitude Valley precinct cameras, comprises more than 4,500 permanent, temporary and mobile cameras with locations chosen in consultation with Queensland Police.
Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads ANPR network
The state's fixed road safety camera functions transferred from police to the department on 1 August 2024. The department operates automated number plate recognition cameras, often co-located with weigh-in-motion sensors, primarily to monitor heavy vehicles and automatically issue infringements for unregistered and uninsured vehicles, working jointly with Queensland Police and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator.
Sources: Queensland Government, number plate recognition cameras
Source: the public record. Australian police-force and government publications, regulator decisions, and Victorian Government open data (Road Safety Camera Network dataset); per-entry citations on each record · retrieved July 2026