New Orleans Police Secretly Used Prohibited Facial Recognition Surveillance for Years
The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) secretly received real-time, AI-generated alerts from 200 facial recognition cameras throughout the city for two years, despite a city ordinance barring generalized surveillance of the public.
“Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime,” an exposé by The Washington Post explains. However, “New Orleans police took this technology a step further,” automatically alerting officers with real-time updates of names and locations of possible matches of wanted suspects from a private network of cameras through a mobile app.Â
“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, 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.” According to Wessler, New Orleans is the first known instance in which a major American city has used artificial intelligence to identify people through live footage for the purpose of making arrests.
The use of these automatic alerts may have violated a city ordinance meant to protect the public’s privacy from a generalized surveillance tool and prevent wrongful arrests due to software errors.Â
Passed in 2022 in response to New Orleans’ post-pandemic crime wave, the Surveillance Technology and Data Protection Ordinance removed a previous prohibition on surveillance technology in criminal investigations to increase public safety. Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at the time that the NOPD needed “every tool available at their disposal” to keep the city’s “residents, businesses and visitors safe
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