Associated Incidents
New Orleans is considering easing restrictions on the police use of facial recognition, weeks after The Washington Post reported that police there secretly relied on a network of AI-powered surveillance cameras to identify suspects on the street and arrest them.
According to the draft of a proposed ordinance posted to a city website, police would be permitted to use automated facial recognition tools to identify and track the movements of wanted subjects, missing people or suspected perpetrators of serious crimes --- reversing the city's broad prohibition against using facial recognition as a "surveillance tool."
The proposed rule, which was written by a New Orleans police official, is scheduled for a City Council vote later this month, according to a person briefed on the council's plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak about them publicly. If the rule passes, New Orleans would become the first U.S. city to formally allow facial recognition as a tool for surveilling residents in real time.
In an emailed statement, a police spokesperson said that the department "does not surveil the public" and that surveillance is "not the goal of this ordinance revision." But the word "surveillance" appears in the proposed ordinance dozens of times, including explicitly giving police authority to use "facial surveillance."
Many police departments use AI to help them identify suspects from still images taken at or near the scene of a crime, but New Orleans police have already taken the technology a step further. Over the past two years, the department relied on a privately owned network of cameras equipped with facial recognition software to constantly monitor the streets for wanted people and automatically ping an app on officers' mobile phones to convey the names and locations of possible matches, The Post reported last month.
In April, after The Post requested public records about this system, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick paused the automated alerts and ordered a review into how officers used the technology and whether the practice violated local restrictions on facial recognition.
David Barnes, a New Orleans police lieutenant overseeing legal research and planning, who wrote the proposed ordinance, said he hopes to complete the review and share his findings before the City Council vote. The facial recognition alerts are still paused, he said Wednesday.
There are no federal regulations around the use of AI by local law enforcement. New Orleans was one of many cities to ban the technology during the policing overhauls passed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, with the City Council saying it had "significant concerns about the role of facial recognition technologies and surveillance databases in exacerbating racial and other bias." Federal studies have shown the technology to be less reliable when scanning people of color, women and older people.
New Orleans partly rolled back the restrictions in 2022, letting police use facial recognition for searches of specific suspects of violent crimes, but not for general tracking of people in public places. Each time police want to scan a face, they must send a still image to trained examiners at a state facility and later provide details about these scans to the City Council --- guardrails meant to protect the public's privacy and prevent software errors from leading to wrongful arrests.
Now, city leaders want to give police broad access to the technology with fewer limitations, arguing that automated surveillance tools are necessary for fighting crime. Violent crime rates in New Orleans, as in much of the country, are at historic lows, according to Jeff Asher, a consultant who tracks crime statistics in the region. But facial recognition-equipped cameras have proved useful in a few recent high-profile incidents, including the May 16 escape of 10 inmates from a local jail and the New Year's Day attack on Bourbon Street that left 14 people dead.
"Violent crime is at an all-time low, but mass murders and shootings are at an all-time high," Oliver Thomas, one of two council members sponsoring the ordinance, said in an interview this week. "This is a tool to deal with some of this mass violence and mass murders and attacks."
After The Post informed Thomas there were 310 fatal and nonfatal shootings in New Orleans last year --- by far the lowest number in the 14 years the City Council has published these statistics on its online crime data dashboard --- he acknowledged that shootings are down and partly attributed the decline to his work with young people and ex-offenders.
Nora Ahmed, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, said council members are using public concern over recent news to justify the widespread adoption of facial recognition technology, or FRT --- a powerful technology with the potential to strip people of their rights.
"In the name of making FRT available for a once-in-a-decade jail break, this bill opens up FRT to being used by federal and state entities, and enterprising local police departments," Ahmed said in a text message. "This type of surveillance should not exist in the United States period."
The new ordinance would give police the ability to use "facial surveillance" and "characteristic tracking" systems to actively monitor the streets looking for people with warrants or people under investigation. It would require them to continue sharing data about facial searches with the City Council and begin reporting details about the software they use and its accuracy.
While the ordinance says police cannot use facial surveillance tools to target abortion seekers or undocumented immigrants, Ahmed says those protections are "paper thin" and worries officers would find ways around them.
It's not clear whether New Orleans plans to keep working with Project NOLA, a privately funded nonprofit group that has provided automated facial recognition alerts to officers despite having no contract with the city. Barnes, the police sergeant, said Project NOLA would need to come into a formal data-sharing agreement with the city if it wanted to continue sending automated alerts to officers who have logged into a Project NOLA system to receive them. Under the new ordinance, Project NOLA could also be required to publish information about all of its searches to the City Council.
Such data reporting could be complicated with a live facial recognition system, in which cameras are constantly scanning every face in their vicinity. With hundreds of cameras potentially scanning thousands of faces a day, Project NOLA or the city could theoretically need to report information about millions of facial recognition scans in each of its quarterly data reports the department is required to provide the City Council.
Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA's founder, declined to comment this week, saying he was on vacation.
New Orleans's embrace of the term "surveillance" --- which appears 40 times in the text of the proposed ordinance --- appears at odds with statements made by Kirkpatrick, the city's top police official. In an interview last month, Kirkpatrick said she believes governments should be prevented from surveilling their citizens, especially when they are in public exercising their constitutional rights.
"I do not believe in surveilling the citizenry and residents of our country," Kirkpatrick said at the time. "Surveilling is an invasion of our privacy."