New Orleans police secretly used live facial recognition to nab people right on the street

Dodgy, sketchy, illegal – you name it. It turns out that New Orleans police spent years scanning live feeds of city streets and secretly using facial recognition technology to identify suspects in real time. A scandal is brewing.

Police indeed use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras – but usually only at or near the scene of a crime.

The New Orleans police took this practice a step further and are now sparking backlash, an investigation by The Washington Post has found.

Officers reportedly utilized a private network of more than 200 facial recognition cameras to automatically ping cops’ phones when a possible match for a suspect was detected.

According to The Post, court records and public data suggest that these cameras “played a role in dozens of arrests,” but most uses were never disclosed in police reports – and that’s a problem.

That’s because a 2022 city council ordinance limited police to using facial recognition only for searches for specific suspects in their investigations of violent crimes.

Cops aren’t supposed to use the technology for surveilling people in public places or, of course, for detaining them when they pop up on live feeds – but that’s what was happening, it seems.

The ordinance – designed to prevent false arrests and protect civil rights – also said that the cops were to send the captured images to a “fusion center” where examiners “trained in identifying faces” using AI software had to agree on alleged matches before officers could even approach suspects.

Instead, “none” of the arrests “were included in the department’s mandatory reports to the city council.”

At least four people arrested were charged with nonviolent crimes, and some cops apparently found the city council process too sluggish and chose to ignore it to get the most out of their access to the tech, the Post found.

New Orleans police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick paused the program of using the facial recognition cameras – bought and managed by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit firm – in April, after an officer saw potential problems during a review.

But the backlash is now very real, if only because the use of automated facial recognition in New Orleans is the first known attempt by police in a major US city to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify people in live camera feeds to make immediate arrests.

“This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone – for that matter, everyone – as we go about our lives walking around in public,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The Post.

By now, using facial recognition is pretty common across police departments in various US cities. But the technology has already been shown multiple times to be unreliable for people of color, women, and older folks.

Experts claim that the technology could be used to create databases that may be hacked or inappropriately used, for instance, in mass surveillance deployed by authoritarian regimes or dictatorships.

Activists and researchers have long claimed that the potential for errors while using the technology is too great and that mistakes could result in the jailing of innocent people.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology noted in a 2019 report that commercial facial recognition systems are biased and falsely identify Black and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than they do White ones, Meredith Broussard noted in her 2023 book “More Than a Glitch.”

Facial recognition must have improved, of course, but experts also claim that the technology could be used to create databases that may be hacked or inappropriately used, for instance, in mass surveillance deployed by authoritarian regimes or dictatorships.