New Orleans police secretly used facial recognition on over 200 live camera feeds

New Orleans’ police force secretly used constant facial recognition to seek out suspects for two years. An investigation by discovered that the city’s police department was using facial recognition technology on a privately owned camera network to continually look for suspects. This application seems to violate a city ordinance passed in 2022 that required facial recognition only be used by the NOLA police to search for specific suspects of violent crimes and then to provide details about the scans’ use to the city council. However, WaPo found that officers did not reveal their reliance on the technology in the paperwork for several arrests where facial recognition was used, and none of those cases were included in mandatory city council reports.

“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, an ACLU deputy director. “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.” Wessler added that the is the first known case in a major US city where police used AI-powered automated facial recognition to identify people in live camera feeds for the purpose of making immediate arrests.

Police use and misuse of surveillance technology has been thoroughly documented over the years. Although several US have placed restrictions on how law enforcement can use facial recognition, those limits won’t do anything to protect privacy if they’re routinely ignored by officers.

Read the full story on the New Orleans PD’s surveillance program at The Washington Post.