New Orleans may be first U.S. city to use live AI facial recognition camera network
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A Project NOLA camera at the Hotel Monteleone. Photo: Edmund D. Fountain for The Washington Post via Getty Images
New Orleans police paused its use of a privately run facial recognition camera network last month amid legal and privacy questions from The Washington Post.
Why it matters: It's likely the first AI-enhanced live surveillance system to be used in a major American city, the paper says of the investigation.
The big picture: New Orleans police have been using information from Project NOLA's 200-plus camera network to find wanted individuals for at least the past two years, Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer wrote in the story.
- Project NOLA's facial recognition cameras monitor the streets and send alerts to officers' phones in real time through an app when the system finds a possible match.
- Project NOLA, a privately run nonprofit, puts in the details about who to look for based on press releases and social media alerts from NOPD and other agencies, Project NOLA founder Bryan Lagarde tells Axios.
Case in point: NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the department used the facial recognition technology Friday to identify one of the 10 inmates who escaped from Orleans Justice Center earlier that day.
- "This is the exact reason why facial recognition technology is so critical," Kirkpatrick said.
- Project NOLA in a post said Louisiana State Police sent the escapees' information at 10:35am Friday. The cameras found two of the escapees less than 10 minutes later in the French Quarter and pinged authorities, leading to the arrest of one.
- The group later released the video footage of the two escapees.
Between the lines: Project NOLA doesn't have a formal contract with the city, Lagarde tells Axios. Individual officers download the app and sign up for alerts, he says.
- NOPD officers are "regrettably" no longer participating in the alerts, he told Axios on Monday. However, he said alerts are still going to LSP and federal agencies.
Flashback: A 2022 City Council ordinance regulates how the city uses facial recognition software, according to reporting by The Lens.
- Before then, it wasn't allowed, but police had been using it for years, according to The Lens.
- Mayor LaToya Cantrell requested to reverse the ban, The Lens said.
The other side: The ACLU of Louisiana blasted the technology in 2022 and again this week.
- "This is the first known time an American police department has relied on live facial recognition technology cameras at scale, and is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives," ACLU said in a statement.
- The organization called on the City Council to launch an investigation into NOPD's use of the system.
What's next: Kirkpatrick told the Washington Post the department is doing a formal review of how many officers used the alerts, what arrests were made and whether this violated the ordinance.
- She also said she's in favor of the city running its own live facial recognition program.