Facial Recognition Technology in the Crosshairs
As the public-private partnership comes under scrutiny, the New Orleans Police Department has suspended its partnership with Project NOLA, which was sending the department real-time facial recognition alerts.
The suspension came on the heels of a Washington Post investigation, which found that the department “secretly relied” on facial recognition provided by a private network of surveillance cameras to search for suspects throughout the city.
The department relied on Project NOLA’s facial recognition cameras to constantly watch for wanted individuals. Set up by the private organization, the software would automatically alert officers through a mobile app to let officers know about the name and current location of a possible match. Officers would then respond by researching the suspect and attempting to arrest the identified person at the location he or she was pinged at.
A Line in the Sand
The NOPD’s use of this technology appears discordant with a 2022 city council ordinance. The ordinance—approved in a 4-2 vote in July 2022—limited police access to the facial recognition system to instances when they were investigating a violent crime or a missing person case. The city also stipulated that facial recognition technology was never to be used as a generalized surveillance tool that could track people in public spaces. The ordinance became effective in November 2022.
The ordinance prohibited the department from generating surveillance based on facial recognition, but it did allow investigators to request the evidence from a third party in an investigation into a specific crime and use facial recognition evidence when it was volunteered to police.
Before turning to facial recognition technology, investigators were supposed to “first exhaust all other methods of identification, and then request permission from a supervisor,” the Times-Picayune reported in 2022. From there, the supervisor would review the investigation into a suspect and, if he or she approved the request, would send a photo of the suspect to the Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange, a state facility and fusion center that analyzes law enforcement data for agencies at all levels. The center would then use its database to identify possible matches, with multiple staff members independently agreeing before delivering a positive match to law enforcement.
City Council Member Eugene Green, who introduced the ordinance, supported the police department’s policies on the use of the technology because they would ensure accuracy in identification of a suspect and provide guardrails. Opponents were skeptical that facial recognition technology would improve public safety, according to the Times-Picayune.
But the partnership between the NOPD and Project NOLA may have enabled law enforcement to circumvent the guardrails.
A New Partnership
A federal audit of the city’s policy and the NOPD’s use and success with facial recognition under the policy found that during 2023 there were only 19 requests made by officers to use facial recognition technology. “Of the 19 requests for facial recognition reviewed, only one produced a match that assisted investigators,” the audit said. “…Multiple investigators remarked they were reluctant to make future requests for facial recognition analysis due to the lag-time and low potential for matches shown by prior submissions.” The report did not mention Project NOLA.
Project NOLA, a nonprofit, began coordinating with the NOPD in 2023, providing help with homicides and robberies. It has been working with police officers directly and does not have a formal contract with the city. “Bryan Lagarde, executive director of Project NOLA, released emails he sent to NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick urging her to review the department’s facial recognition policy,” FOX News reported. “He pointed to the more than 5,000 Project NOLA cameras positioned across the city and called for clarity.”
Lagarde told the Post that law enforcement could not add or remove people from the system’s watch list.
Kirkpatrick had previously assured Lagarde that providing the police with live alerts for wanted individuals did not violate department policy and was in accordance with the city’s surveillance policy, Lagarde told FOX News.
Created in 2009, Project NOLA is a private nonprofit organization that operates a networked high-definition crime camera program. According to its website, it provides the cameras to residents, business owners, developers, associations, and municipalities. The cameras’ footage, which can be viewed by a camera’s respective host, is kept in the organization’s information center at the University of New Orleans. “For privacy purposes, Project NOLA only maintains camera video for about 10 days and only provides camera footage to law enforcement,” its website said.
While the alert system is not described in detail on Project NOLA’s website, it does note that its services benefit “smaller police departments by proactively monitoring crime cameras to identify/locate violent repeat offenders and gang hierarchy.”
At the time of Security Management’s publication, Project NOLA had not responded to a request for comment.
Hitting the Pause Button
Kirkpatrick initially paused the department’s partnership with Project NOLA in April in response to a police captain who recognized that the alerts could be a problem, according to the Post, which began asking for public records related to the alerts back in February. The ban initially prohibited the department’s 8th District (which serves the popular French Quarter, as well as the city’s Central Business District) from receiving alerts from Project NOLA. A city-wide ban on the service was implemented a few weeks later, according to the Times-Picayune.
However, cameras maintained by Project NOLA were used in the recent manhunt for 10 men who escaped from the Orleans Justice Center on 16 May, according to a statement Kirkpatrick made to ABC News.
“Kirkpatrick…and Jason Williams, [the city’s] top prosecutor, both said they are in discussions with the city council to revise the facial recognition ordinance. Kirkpatrick says she supports the idea of the city legally operating its own live facial recognition program, without the involvement of Project NOLA and with certain boundaries, such as prohibiting use of the technology to identify people at a protest,” according the Post.
While there are no federal regulations to guide or constrain local law enforcement’s use of artificial intelligence, four U.S. states (Maryland, Montana, Vermont, and Virginia) and several other cities across the nation prohibit their respective police departments from using facial recognition for real-time identification or tracking, the Post noted.
“Many states have proposed restrictions on the use of [facial recognition technologies] in various contexts, and some of these have become law, but there is not a uniform set of privacy restrictions on facial recognition in the United States,” says Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, managing director for the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). “In the policing context, the number of states and local jurisdictions with limitations or bans on the use of facial recognition has been growing steadily over recent years.”
