Город Кейптаун интегрирует данные дронов с камерами и другими источниками для создания единой оперативной картины

The City of Cape Town is moving beyond treating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) as standalone surveillance tools, integrating drone feeds with cameras, body-worn systems, automatic number-plate readers and other data sources to create a real-time operational picture. The City’s experience and vision for the use of UAS systems was described by Andrew Mortimer, Manager: Emergency, Policing Incident Command, Safety and Security Directorate at the City of Cape Town, who delivered a presentation on “UAS in Action: Advancing Public Safety Through Integrated Digital Twin and Command-and-Control Capabilities” at the Aeronautical Society of South Africa (AeSSA) annual conference in Stellenbosch in July. Mortimer said Cape Town’s scale and operational environment demanded technology that could convert information into decisions quickly. The City has more than 4.8 million residents and handles roughly 2 500 calls every 24 hours, with about 1 000 becoming incidents. “The challenge is not collecting the information. The challenge is not generating the information. The challenge is how do we deal with it?” he told delegates. The objective, he said, was to transform data into “actionable decisions quickly enough to change outcomes”. Cape Town has accumulated substantial volumes of data through decades of investment in CCTV, computer-aided dispatch, digital evidence and body-worn cameras. The City has rolled out about 3 500 body-worn cameras, generating tens of thousands of video files daily. Drones have become an important new sensor. During the 2025-26 financial year, Cape Town conducted 3 643 drone flights, with thousands focused on monitoring land-invasion hotspots. About 135 such areas are monitored monthly or every two months. UAS are also used for fires, floods, search and rescue, crowd monitoring, tactical overwatch, officer safety and evidence collection. During search-and-rescue operations, drones can travel ahead of ground teams and provide commanders with an aerial safety view. Mortimer highlighted the value of combining sensors. In one incident involving a vehicle on one of the City’s highways, information was simultaneously available from a drone, CCTV camera, officer body camera and vehicle dash cameras. The network provided situational awareness and evidence. He described an incident in which a drone operator warned commanders on the ground against advancing a police unit down a road because a group was positioned in a side alley, ready to attack them from behind once the unit proceeded ahead. The aerial view helped prevent a potentially serious ambush. “The drone itself is not the capability,” Mortimer stressed. “The capability is the intelligence generated by the tools.” Cape Town is developing what Mortimer described as its first operational public-safety digital twin: a live common operating picture integrating incidents, resources, risks and operational context. The digital twin represent a real-time digital map of the City’s public-safety environment, bring together drone and CCTV feeds, body cameras from officers in the field, automatic number-plate recognition, emergency incidents and dispatch information, GIS mapping and geographic data, locations of officers and other resources, together with operational information from partner organisations. For example, instead of a drone operator seeing a suspicious vehicle and reporting “there’s a vehicle here”, the digital twin could show the vehicle’s location alongside nearby CCTV cameras, the location of police units, the relevant incident, road information and other available intelligence. The commander can therefore make a decision based on the context surrounding the drone’s observation. The system currently displays 850 objects on a single live map, using a 24-hour rolling real-time situational picture. The next stage is an integrated safety and security fusion centre, rather than a standalone drone operations centre. Drone feeds will sit alongside CCTV, body-worn cameras, incident systems, traffic information and other intelligence sources. He also stressed that UAS should not be viewed as replacements for manned aircraft. A manned aircraft can remain airborne for six to eight hours and rapidly reach distant incidents, day or night, while drones offer faster deployment for localised events. “They are distinctly different tools,” he explained. For the aviation industry, Mortimer’s message was blunt: Cities will judge UAS providers on outcomes, not flight hours. Integration with command structures and ground forces matters more than simply putting more aircraft into the sky. The longer-term objective is autonomous, beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, potentially using strategically positioned drone docks or tethered systems to respond within minutes to emergencies. “Tech doesn’t solve problems by itself,” Mortimer said. The combination of people, processes, data and partnerships, he argued, is what turns technology into public-safety capability. Cape Town is leading South African cities in the use and integration of UAVs in the safety and security environment, transitioning from incident response to making aerial intelligence an integral part of a connected public-safety system.