Brazilian AI against crime reaches 194 cities in Goiás

IA Contra o Crime, a program run by the Goiás state government, has reached 194 of the 202 municipalities set to receive the technology by the end of this year – more than 90% of the planned rollout. The next steps were presented on Monday (September 14) at a technical meeting with the regional commands of the state's security forces, in Goiânia, attended by Governor Daniel Vilela. Once the stage is complete, the network will have more than 5,300 new cameras and an estimated reach of 95% of the population.

"This is a system that already exists, and it will now be expanded with a far more significant number of cameras across the state. More than 200 municipalities will be covered by the end of the year. And after that, our plan is to reach all 246," the governor said.

The platform behind the program was built by Pax, a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup. The company was founded in 2024 as Paladium, set up to build Brazilian public-safety technology from the ground up, and adopted the Pax brand in March of this year, when it was formally announced to the market.

In Goiás, it brings the Military Police, Civil Police, Fire Department and Forensics Police into a single environment for image analysis, with cameras positioned according to the crime heat map. Since the pilot began in May 2025, the platform has supported the resolution of more than 2,500 police cases, more than 1,000 arrests and the recovery of more than 1,000 vehicles – results achieved, according to the Goiás state government, with only 10% of the equipment planned for the end of the current stage.

Searching by description, not just by plate

The platform's technical difference lies in working with very little to start from. Instead of requiring a full license plate or a sharp image of a face, the artificial intelligence interprets descriptions – clothing color, vehicle color, a sticker – and sweeps the image archive for matches, handing the investigator a set of candidates for human verification.

"We need just one small detail — sometimes the color of a shirt, sometimes the color of a car, sometimes a sticker on a car. That is already enough for our platform, with artificial intelligence, to make a quick identification," Vilela explained.

That is what explains why the program is advancing in mid-sized and small cities: with every new camera integrated, the archive available to the security forces grows, and with it the chance of reconstructing the movement of a vehicle or a suspect across different municipalities.

An architectural decision: national technology, police operation

The platform was built entirely in Brazil, with models trained for the Brazilian public-safety context – from the mix of vehicles on the road to the vocabulary of incident reports. Operation belongs to the security forces: it is the officers who run the queries, who decide and who conduct the investigation; Pax provides the technology and the technical verification of results. Goiás was the first state to adopt the platform, in 2025, and the Goiás experience became the reference for the company's other deployments across the country.

"Pax is made up of talented young people who had already made their mark at other technology companies, but who came together and decided to build a new company with a mission to help Brazil — to make sure we had homegrown technology capable of advancing what is today Brazilians' foremost demand: public safety," the governor said.

At the same meeting, Pax CEO and founder David Peixoto described to the security force commands how the platform was developed. The company's first project was in Luziânia, in the region bordering the Federal District.

"It wasn't built in a lab. It isn't a product imported into a different reality. It was built with a combination that is essential: engineering together with the police. What you see here is nothing more than what we learned from you, turned into a tool."

— David Peixoto, CEO and founder of Pax

Also planned is the integration of footage captured by public and private cameras, expanding the volume of information available for prevention and investigation. After reaching the 202 municipalities, the Goiás state government's goal is to extend the system to all 246 municipalities in the state.

"When we started designing this technology here in Goiás, I said we wanted to build together the best artificial intelligence platform for public safety in the world. At the time that was a bold statement. It still is, but I think we are much closer. And Brazil has everything it needs to become the world's reference country for this technology," David Peixoto said.