New Orleans, home of Bourbon Street revelry, has become the first American city known to have a live facial recognition network. How that came to be is a story of private initiative and political inaction, and may point to the future public safety uses of this surveillance technology.
Police around the country routinely use facial recognition after a crime, to speed up the identification of suspects caught on camera. But live facial recognition, which can name and track a person moving around a city in real time, has been slower to catch on in the U.S. Aside from isolated experiments, police departments have shied away from the technology, fearing a backlash over privacy.
In New Orleans, the technology was introduced by a private non-profit organization, Project NOLA, founded in 2009 by a former police officer named Bryan Lagarde.
"I was one of the people sitting in the hot car many years ago, taking pictures and videos of gangsters," he says. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, when the police department was severely under-staffed, he says it became obvious to him that the city needed more cameras. "I recognized early on that it can act as a force multiplier. A wonderful force multiplier."
He says Project NOLA acts as a kind of clearinghouse for video feeds from over 5,000 cameras that are mounted on the private property of "volunteers," who pay annual connection fees.
It's a massive amount of video, so in 2022 he added live facial recognition abilities.
"We're able to process more needle-in-a-haystack requests and see very successful results a lot faster," he says. "And we're less likely to miss something."
About 200 of the network's most advanced cameras now have this capacity. At Project NOLA's offices, in a building on the campus of the University of New Orleans, monitors show those cameras constantly searching out the faces of unsuspecting strangers as they amble through the French Quarter. When a face matches one of the approximately 250 people on Project NOLA's "hot lists," a computer voice alerts the staff.
"That said 'Tier Two Hot List,'" Lagarde explains as an alert sounds. "That is going to be somebody that we've seen recently, with a gun, involved in gang activity."
On busy days, Lagarde says, there are hundreds of hits. Some targets are wanted by federal, state or local agencies. Others are people Lagarde is tracking on his own initiative, because of their apparent involvement in felony-level criminal activity.
He says that information goes to law enforcement when it rises to a certain level.
"We're not just saying, 'Oh, somebody's selling drugs in a neighborhood, we think they're bad,'" he says. "We're showing, 'Here's the frequency that they're selling drugs. Here's the type of drugs that they're selling. Here's who's armed, they're being aggressive.'"
But Project NOLA's collaboration with city police hit a snag in the spring.
While Lagarde says he was open from the start about his use of facial recognition, it still took many by surprise when a Washington Post story in May detailed New Orleans' first-in-the-country system.
"That actually violated our local NOPD ordinance," says Sarah Whittington, advocacy director of the ACLU of Louisiana. She says local law "did allow for facial recognition, but did not allow for this type of live facial recognition from a third-party entity."
New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick says she had determined in April, before the story came out, that cooperation with Project NOLA might violate city ordinance. So she paused it.
"We are not going to allow a real-time alert to the officers until we know we are within the law, and clearly within the law," Kirkpatrick says.
Yet Kirkpatrick's pause doesn't stem from opposition to the technology itself. On the contrary, she views live facial recognition as a valuable policing tool.
"We are not at war with Project NOLA — I want to be sure we have an understanding about that. But that's a private business," she says. "And you cannot control your privacy concerns through private enterprise."
Federal law does not specifically address how law enforcement may use live facial recognition, but the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Jones that police must have probable cause and a warrant to use technology to follow someone "continuously."
University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, who's written extensively about technology law, says the situation in New Orleans looks like a "shell game" for this legal responsibility.
"My concern would be that if the surveillance is done 'by the community,' by people that are not official actors, that it will circumvent those protections," Calo warns.
He notes law enforcement has employed similar workarounds with other surveillance technologies over the years, such as purchases of dossiers about potential suspects from private data brokers.
At Project NOLA, Lagarde says he is very careful about privacy.
"We all have something to protect," he says. "We use this system every day, practically all day, to track violent offenders. We see the power of this. We see how something like this — in the wrong hands without guardrails — how it can be abused."
Lagarde says his guardrails include getting a case number for every facial recognition request from law enforcement to verify there's a legitimate investigation. He's also planning a website on which Project NOLA will disclose how many facial recognition requests it gets, and from which agencies.
He says Project NOLA still does searches for federal and state police agencies. It also continues to feed information to NOPD, he says, because it keeps track of who the department is looking for. When the camera spots them, he says it sends police "unsolicited" tips.
Lagarde says, in the final analysis, he believes his system is more accountable than a government-run system would be, because Project NOLA's cameras are mounted on private property and hosted by "volunteers."
"It's a community's choice. If they want it, they do it. If they don't want it, they don't do it," he says. "And if they want it and do it and then later think 'We don't want to do it anymore,' they can unplug the cameras themselves!"
The city, meanwhile, has put off deciding what it wants. After the Washington Post story, a city council member introduced legislation to formalize police cooperation with third-party providers of facial recognition data. The ordinance also proposed rules and reporting requirements for the technology. It didn't advance.
There's also been discussion of authorizing the city to build its own live facial recognition system, something NOPD Superintendent Kirkpatrick supports, but the ACLU's Whittington says that idea has stalled for fear of losing control of it to other agencies – especially given the recent increase in federal immigration enforcement in southern Louisiana.
"Nothing in a city ordinance could protect people, if the federal government or the state government steps in to say, 'Well, you've built this system, and we have come.'"
But without a clearer prohibition on police use of the non-profit's facial recognition, Whittington says, "I think we've defaulted to a private model."
On Bourbon street, most people still seem unaware that many of the cameras above their heads are able to put names to faces. When it's pointed out to Zac Shoulders, visiting from Houston, he calls it "vaguely big-brotherish," but says what matters most to him is who controls the list of names that are being scanned for.
"If it is the city, at least they can say, 'Hey you voted us to be in this position to do these things.' Whereas if it's a non-profit, it's just not the same situation."
But Tim Blake, who owns the Three Legged Dog bar, takes the opposing view. Not only does he host one of the live facial recognition-capable cameras over his front door, he has another camera issued by Project NOLA inside the bar, equipped with thermal vision, capable of spotting hidden guns.
"I'm a bigger proponent of surveillance systems, of Project NOLA in particular, than I was ten years ago," he says. "I feel safer, my staff feels safer. People, they tend to behave — unfortunately, unfortunately! — when you're being watched, you tend to behave."
For Blake, the country needs more cameras like this, run by restaurants, schools, cities, or anyone willing to deploy them.
"In my mind, the more people that have access to this type of technology, the safer everybody is," he says.
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