The body cameras the South African Police Service wants to buy must be able to perform facial recognition, according to a SITA tender published this week. The requirement sits in RFB 3286-2026, a three-year contract for body-worn and dashboard cameras and related software, and it is mandatory.

A bid that fails any mandatory requirement is not evaluated further. Bids close at 11am on 29 September.

The tender asks for more than an accountability tool. The video management software must include motion detection, facial recognition and licence plate recognition.

Dashboard cameras must carry embedded AI, including automatic number plate recognition and event detection triggered by blue lights, a door opening or a collision, with an option for an interior camera facing occupants. The body cameras must support continuous background recording, buffer 120 seconds either side of the record button, be remotely switchable, and can have their sound, alarm and light indicators turned off. In other words, a device that can record without anyone near it knowing.

What the specification never states is what the police would do with facial recognition or against which database a face would be matched. It details chain of custody carefully but says nothing about the rules for using the technology.

Two things remain undisclosed: how many cameras will be bought, since the pricing schedule asks only for unit prices and buys more as and when needed, and the legal basis, since SITA and the SAPS had not answered TechCentral's questions by publication.

TechCentral, which read the tender documents, notes there is no South African law setting out when an officer must switch a camera on, who may view footage, how long it is kept, or whether a face may be matched against anything. The Information Regulator's April 2023 enforcement notice against the SAPS found the service could not rely on POPIA's law-enforcement exclusion because it had no safeguards established in legislation, which is the same gap this tender walks into.

TechCentral's earlier reporting cites a 2017 Las Vegas study finding officers who wore cameras drew significantly fewer excessive-force complaints, which is the genuine case for the programme.

Body cameras themselves are a good idea, with real evidence behind them, and that is exactly why the rest matters. A week ago the deadline problem was that the tender had not been advertised. Now it has, and the surprise is what it contains: a hard requirement for facial recognition that no South African law governs.

The Information Regulator has already told the SAPS, in writing, that without safeguards in legislation, its data processing falls under POPIA. This tender asks vendors to build the capability anyway, ahead of any rules on when it runs or whose faces it checks.

For anyone in the security industry, note the direction. The state is about to normalise mandatory facial recognition on a mobile fleet, and the standards it sets, on background recording, silent operation and biometric matching, are the standards your own products and clients will be measured against next.

The comment window on the tender is the moment to ask the questions SITA has not answered.

You might also like our piece on the SAPS body camera tender's missing deadline, the connected car abuse case that showed who controls a recording device, and the two digital ID apps government is building at once.

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