New Zealand Police
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
New Zealand Police has operated its own vehicle-mounted automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) since 2009, when five patrol cars were fitted with roof-mounted units able to scan up to 3,000 plates an hour; the fleet had grown by a further 13 vehicles by 2014. Plate reads not matched to a vehicle of interest are deleted within 48 hours under Police policy. This is Police's own hardware, distinct from its separate access to the privately run Auror and vGRID/SaferCities ANPR networks, which Police does not own or operate.
New Zealand Police runs a facial recognition capability, NEC's NeoFace engine, inside its Automated Biometric Information System (ABIS 2), which went live in 2020 after a Dataworks Plus-run upgrade costing more than NZ$9 million. Police disclosed in September 2024 that the system had been used for retrospective facial recognition searches 89 times between March 2022 and September 2024, none of them live searches; Police released their first public facial recognition policy in August 2024.
Sources: RNZ, Police setting up $9m facial recognition system which can identify people from CCTV feed (31 Aug 2020)RNZ, NZ Police used facial recognition technology 89 times since 2022 (14 Sep 2024)
Source: the public record. New Zealand Police and government publications, council tenders, and council Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA) responses; per-entry citations on each record · retrieved July 2026