New Orleans police use real-time facial recognition without prior authorization
New Orleans police secretly used real-time facial recognition technology from Project NOLA to track individuals without prior authorization, prompting civil liberties concerns and leading the city council to consider an ordinance to legalize the practice with safeguards against its use for proactive policing.
What happened
New Orleans police received real-time facial recognition notifications through a private surveillance camera network operated by Project NOLA without prior authorization. The system uploaded images of suspects into a facial recognition system that scanned faces at video cameras to identify and track individuals moving about the city.
Reported impact
The American Civil Liberties Union warned that use of the live facial recognition technology at scale constituted "a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives." Experts raised concerns that automatic alerts from the system may have violated an earlier city ordinance meant to protect public privacy and prevent wrongful arrests due to software errors.
Index analysis
The New Orleans City Council proposed an ordinance to legalize real-time facial recognition use for investigating crimes and missing persons, which would supersede earlier privacy protections. The ordinance would prohibit facial recognition matches alone from establishing probable cause for arrest, but these protections could be overturned in the future.
Governance controls
An earlier city ordinance had restricted police use of real-time facial recognition as a surveillance tool. The proposed city ordinance would limit facial recognition use to crime and missing persons investigations, preventing use for proactive policing, and requiring additional evidence for arrests.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.