New Orleans Police Secretly Used Facial Recognition

The Washington Post reports:

For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found.

Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime. New Orleans police took this technology a step further, utilizing a private network of more than 200 facial recognition cameras to watch over the streets, constantly monitoring for wanted suspects and automatically pinging officers’ mobile phones through an app to convey the names and current locations of possible matches.

This appears out of step with a 2022 city council ordinance, which limited police to using facial recognition only for searches of specific suspects in their investigations of violent crimes and never as a more generalized “surveillance tool” for tracking people in public places.

Read the full article.

NOPD has been circumventing the regulated facial recognition ordinance by utilizing privately owned and operated camerashttps://t.co/wynmtdpnfk

— Bob Murrell for District A (@bob4districta) May 19, 2025