NEW ORLEANS, LA – The ACLU and the ACLU of Louisiana are calling on the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) to stop using facial recognition technology, following a recent investigation revealing that the department is undermining City Council orders by employing such methods.
Project NOLA, launched in 2009 by former patrol officer and investigator Bryan Lagarde, began as a video surveillance business before adding cameras with facial recognition capabilities in 2023. According to the ACLU, over 200 of these cameras have since been installed throughout New Orleans, with most concentrated in the French Corridor.
Project NOLA is privately owned and contracted by local businesses. NOPD officers are able to download an app that sends alerts directly from Lagarde’s cameras to their phones, “enabling immediate stops and detentions based on unverified purported facial recognition matches,” the ACLU reports.
The facial recognition software scans the faces of every passerby and automatically cross-checks them against police mugshot databases. However, according to The Washington Post, at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested due to errors in this technology, with women, people of color, and the elderly being particularly vulnerable to misidentification.
Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice advocacy group Color of Change, believes facial recognition technology is yet another example of “racist policing” in the United States, as The New York Times highlights.
Randal Reid’s case exemplifies this. Despite never having been in Louisiana, Reid was wrongfully arrested for allegedly shoplifting thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise from consignment stores in the state. A facial recognition camera mistakenly identified him as the suspect, leading to a week in jail for Reid and substantial legal fees for his family—all because he resembled the actual perpetrator.
New Orleans has faced debates over the use of facial recognition technology for criminal identification purposes in the past. In 2022, the City Council passed a “guardrails” ordinance reversing a 2020 ban on facial recognition software. While the ordinance lifted the outright ban, it maintained a prohibition on surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition capabilities—a provision that Project NOLA is now disregarding, according to the ACLU.
Some city officials argue that police are not violating the city’s facial recognition ordinance because they do not own the cameras or contract with Lagarde; they merely receive tips from an outside group performing its own facial recognition scans, reports The Washington Post.
However, the ACLU contends that the issue with private companies like Project NOLA is that they are not bound by the same laws as public law enforcement. Danny Engelberg, chief public defender for New Orleans, explains, “When you make this a private entity, all those guardrails that are supposed to be in place for law enforcement and prosecution are no longer there, and we don’t have the tools to do what we do, which is hold people accountable.”
Additionally, the ACLU notes that NOPD officers almost never include the assistance of Project NOLA in investigative reports or mandated public records. In the case of Randal Reid, The New York Times reports that his arrest reports contained no mention of facial recognition technology, and Reid was not given any information about why or how he was detained. The ACLU believes this raises “serious questions about compliance with constitutional requirements to preserve and turn over evidence to people accused of crimes and to courts.”
As a result, the ACLU is demanding the reinstatement of a ban on all live-feed facial recognition technology. The organization views Project NOLA’s collaboration with the NOPD as a “direct threat to the fundamental rights of every individual,” citing multiple misidentifications, violations of a city ordinance, and overall disruption of the privacy rights of New Orleans residents as justifiable reasons for this demand.
Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, asserts that Project NOLA’s facial recognition cameras are representative of “authoritarian surveillance states, and have no place in American policing.”
