New Orleans Police Used Facial Recognition Cameras

New Orleans police secretly used a live facial recognition program to identify suspects in real time despite a 2022 city council ordinance that limited use of the software to suspects in the police's investigations of violent crimes, according to an investigation published Monday by the Washington Post.

New Orleans since 2023 has relied on face-recognition-enabled surveillance cameras through its "Project NOLA" private camera network after the city council lifted the ban on the technology.

But they imposed guardrails on its use, maintaining a ban on the technology as a surveillance tool. Police flouted those guidelines, constantly monitoring the more than 200 cameras across New Orleans equipped with the software for wanted suspects.

"This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about," Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who has closely tracked the use of AI technologies by police, told the Post.

"This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone — for that matter, everyone — as we go about our lives walking around in public."

Reese Harper, a spokesman for the agency, told the Post the police department "does not own, rely on, manage, or condone the use by members of the department of any artificial intelligence systems associated with the vast network of Project NOLA crime cameras."

The NOPD is supposed to send a still image to trained examiners at a state facility and provide details about those scans in reports to the city council when they want to scan a face, but officers did not disclose their reliance on the technology in police arrests for most of the arrests for which they provided detailed records. None of the cases was included in the department's mandatory reports to the city council.

Project NOLA is a private group run by a former police officer.

Anne Kirkpatrick, who heads the New Orleans Police Department, told the Post her agency has launched a formal review into the how many officers used real-time alerts sent to them when the technology detect a purported match to someone on a secretive, privately maintained watchlist, how many people were arrested as a result, how often the matches appear to have been wrong, and whether these uses violated the city ordinance.

"We're going to do what the ordinance says, and the policies say, and if we find that we're outside of those things, we're going to stop it, correct it and get within the boundaries of the ordinance," she said.