New Orleans police secretly used facial recognition on over 200 stay digicam feeds

New Orleans’ police power secretly used fixed facial recognition to hunt out suspects for 2 years. An investigation by found that the town’s police division was utilizing facial recognition expertise on a privately owned digicam community to repeatedly search for suspects. This utility appears to violate a metropolis ordinance handed in 2022 that required facial recognition solely be utilized by the NOLA police to seek for particular suspects of violent crimes after which to supply particulars in regards to the scans’ use to the town council. Nevertheless, WaPo discovered that officers didn’t reveal their reliance on the expertise within the paperwork for a number of arrests the place facial recognition was used, and none of these instances had been included in obligatory metropolis council stories.

“That is the facial recognition expertise nightmare state of affairs that we’ve been frightened about,” mentioned Nathan Freed Wessler, an ACLU deputy director. “That is the federal government giving itself the facility to trace anybody — for that matter, everybody — as we go about our lives strolling round in public.” Wessler added that the is the primary identified case in a significant US metropolis the place police used AI-powered automated facial recognition to determine folks in stay digicam feeds for the aim of constructing rapid arrests.

Police use and misuse of surveillance expertise has been totally documented through the years. Though a number of US have positioned restrictions on how regulation enforcement can use facial recognition, these limits will not do something to guard privateness in the event that they’re routinely ignored by officers.

Learn the total story on the New Orleans PD’s surveillance program at The Washington Post.