But after the New Year's Day attack on Bourbon Street and last month's jailbreak by 10 Orleans Parish detainees, some civic and elected leaders say it's time the city loosened the reins on the Police Department's use of facial recognition technology.
At the request of NOPD, City Council members Oliver Thomas and Eugene Green are sponsoring a rewrite of a 2022 ordinance that has kept the department's use of facial recognition in check, following a near-ban on it before then.
The proposed changes come after NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick in April halted the ability of her officers to receive alerts on facial recognition hits for wanted subjects through Project NOLA, a privately run network of security cameras in the city. They also come as two Orleans Justice Center inmates, Antoine Massey and Derrick Groves, remain at large three weeks after they escaped.
With about 200 cameras geared for facial recognition in New Orleans, Project NOLA works with Louisiana State Police troopers, federal agents, and also sheriffs in nearby parishes. But Kirkpatrick stopped the alerts to NOPD officers on April 7 pending a review of the arrangement, and whether it complies with the city ordinance.
The move came as the Washington Post was reporting a story that found New Orleans police were among the first adopters of citywide "live" facial recognition, with suspects identified in real time. Civil liberties groups have raised the specter of a surveillance state from a technology that can put a name to a face from blocks away.
The same day Kirkpatrick halted the Project NOLA alerts, consultants hired to assess security in the wake of the Jan. 1 vehicle attack on Bourbon Street, which left 14 people dead, urged major upgrades to NOPD's crime-fighting technology. The report from Teneo found a department with "critical" intelligence gaps, while noting the city clamps on facial recognition.
"This tool could have been helpful in the expeditious recognition of the escaped inmates. Could have assisted with the terrorist attack," said Thomas in a text message. "We have oversight and restrictions on this tool."
NOPD-only restrictions
When the council might consider a change is uncertain.
The latest push to loosen the rules for NOPD, which remains under federal court oversight, drew public support last week from the NOLA Coalition, a group of more than 600 businesses and nonprofits that formed in 2022. It called Thursday on city officials to get behind "constitutional use of such advanced policing technology" and to give officers better access to it.
"We want to be able to see the NOPD use the same technologies that federal and state law enforcement is using in the city," said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, which is part of the coalition.
The current ordinance and NOPD policy allow officers, after exhausting other options, to ask Louisiana State Police to run facial recognition searches over specified violent crimes, including shootings, carjackings and rapes. NOPD policy requires officers to request the analysis through the state's surveillance hub, the Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange.
Just how far a revised ordinance might go to free NOPD's use of facial recognition, along with other tools such as cell-site simulators, is unclear. Green said there were several amendments in play.
Goyeneche argued that it should let NOPD use facial recognition to identify wanted subjects on the street.
"What Teneo was talking about is, the immediacy needs to be there. It cannot pass through multiple filters and daisy chains, because this is actionable information," Goyeneche said. "Particularly when you're talking about a police department that's understaffed. They need to be more strategic."
Teneo found a slipshod intelligence system at NOPD. Long term, the consultants recommended that NOPD set up its own intelligence "fusion" center.
"Current intelligence monitoring is predominantly reactive and manual, relying on officers to sift through information and identify relevant threats without the support of advanced intelligence tools including social media monitoring platforms," the report found, "creating a significant gap in situational awareness."
City cameras ill equipped
When it comes to the gear, Project NOLA's system is far more advanced than the city's camera network, said founder Brian Lagarde. The operation's facial recognition cameras are concentrated in commercial areas, he said.
As of Friday, the blackout that Kirkpatrick placed on alerts from those cameras remained in effect. Lagarde said it's only the latest review of a system that has so far passed legal muster, and he questioned why the NOPD pause has lasted two months.
"This is where the public needs to decide what they want," Lagarde said.
Critics of the technology have cited studies showing racial bias in facial recognition systems, particularly with Black subjects. Last month, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto's office settled with a Georgia man who sued over his arrest and jailing in 2022, alleging a false facial recognition match by a JPSO detective. The amount of the settlement to Randal Quran Reid, who is Black, was not immediately available.
The ACLU of Louisiana argues for another freeze in New Orleans, saying Project NOLA's system is dangerous and allows surveillance by facial recognition, against the current ordinance.
"It gives the government a truly unprecedented power to identify and track us as we go about our daily lives," the group's executive director, Alanah Odoms, wrote in a May 20 letter urging the council to impose a moratorium on NOPD's use of facial recognition.
The city's own camera network, operated by the city's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness through the Real Time Crime Center, hasn't been very useful for facial recognition, officials have said.
The most recent federal monitor's report found facial recognition "not being heavily used" by NOPD. The monitors reported 19 requests by NOPD for all of 2023 to the state fusion center, and only one useful match.
Lagarde said the city's cameras have subpar resolution, mostly operating in 720p or 1080p, and can capture faces clearly up to about 25 feet.
"We're able to clearly see faces 700 feet away, regardless of lighting conditions," Lagarde said of Project NOLA. "The city's cameras are not capable of facial recognition. They would have to replace a very large number of cameras, possibly all of the cameras they have."
Tapping private network
In the meantime, Project NOLA has notched some notable successes of late. Its cameras helped retrace the planning of the Jan. 1 vehicle attacker, while excluding suspected accomplices, Lagarde said.
A facial recognition alert from Project NOLA also helped State Police arrest Kendell Myles, the first of the 10 New Orleans jail escapees to be re-captured. By then, the alerts to NOPD officers were off.
Green pointed to how little NOPD, by contrast, has pursued facial recognition searches.
"The testimony we have is that it's been so infrequently used. I don't know if that is a good thing in terms of public safety," Green said. "If it has been proven relative to capture of escaped inmates, then it should be an available tool in the toolbox. We have so many safeguards in place."
Green portrayed the "tenor" of the proposed ordinance as a measure "to say that in emergency situations, that facial recognition should be able to be used without all of the aspects of the safeguards that were in place."
Lagarde said the proposed ordinance, as he understands it, would free up NOPD to tap the Project NOLA network without concern as it builds up its own facial recognition capabilities.
Lagarde argued that today's ordinance still allows the NOPD to receive alerts from Project NOLA for wanted subjects identified through facial recognition.
"But what they can't do is say, straight up, 'Hey, Project NOLA, can you help us do that?" Lagarde said.
He said the proposed ordinance would change that, while adding to the crimes for which police could deploy facial recognition.
Still awaiting is a verdict on Kirkpatrick's review of the Project NOLA alerts. In response to questions Friday, an NOPD spokesperson said Kirkpatrick was out of the office and would return early next week.
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