New York
CNN
—
Minutes after Louisiana State Police got word on Friday morning that 10 inmates had escaped a New Orleans jail, two of them were spotted on facial recognition cameras in the city’s French Quarter. Police arrested one of the escapees shortly after; the other, days later.
The cameras were part of a network of around 5,000 operated around the city by the non-profit Project NOLA, 200 of which are outfitted with facial recognition technology. State police had shared information about the jailbreak with the organization.
The incident marks a win for the organization, whose camera network is believed to be unprecedented in the United States. The group is emblematic of a growing — albeit controversial — push to use facial recognition technology to help solve crimes.
“This is the exact reason why facial recognition technology is so critical,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said during a press conference earlier this week.
But as adoption of the technology has grown, advocacy groups warn that it could undermine individual privacy. Even worse, inaccurate matches by facial recognition technology systems run by police departments elsewhere have led to false arrests in other cities.
In New Orleans, those concerns may be heightened by the fact that Project NOLA is independent from local law enforcement agencies — although it shares information with police — and therefore isn’t necessarily subject to the same scrutiny or accountability.
“This is the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement following a Washington Post report about the effort earlier this week.
But Project NOLA is a community endeavor, said Executive Director Bryan Lagarde, supported by the churches, schools, businesses and individual homeowners who he says allow the group to place cameras on their properties and can remove them at any time.
“This has been a community endeavor from the very beginning,” Lagarde told CNN. “If we ever violate public trust, (the camera network) comes down instantly and effortlessly by the community that built it.”
Project NOLA was created in 2009 to be a “force multiplier” for local law enforcement agencies, whose resources had been impacted by Hurricane Katrina, Lagarde said. Today, the non-profit also operates 5,000 cameras in other cities around the country.
Project NOLA takes images of wanted suspects from law enforcement “be on the lookout” alerts and feeds them into its “hot list” system. When its network of facial recognition cameras identifies a potential match, it sends a real-time alert to law enforcement.
That’s what happened on Friday, when two of the escaped inmates walked in front of Project NOLA cameras mounted on local businesses in New Orleans’ French Quarter. One was arrested shortly after. The other was tracked to a housing complex where Project NOLA does not have cameras but was arrested on Tuesday thanks in part to the information provided by Project NOLA about his likely location, according to the group.
Five escapees from the Friday jailbreak remain at large.
Project NOLA cameras were also used to investigate the New Orleans terror attack last New Year’s Day that killed 14 people. Lagarde declined to provide the name of the third-party company that makes the facial recognition artificial intelligence model the group uses in its cameras.
As with many applications of AI, there is no federal regulation regarding whether and how AI can be used by local law enforcement. But a number of other cities have barred the use of facial recognition by government agencies, including police, over concerns about its efficacy and ethical implications.
Research has shown that the technology is less effective at correctly identifying women and people of color than white men, fueling worries that the tech’s shortcomings could have an outsize impact on historically marginalized groups. Given the history of racial bias within some US police forces, “Black and other people of color are at greater risk of misidentification,” when facial recognition is brought into the fold, Nicol Turner Lee and Caitlin Chin Rothman wrote in a 2022 Brookings report.
CNN has reached out to NOPD for comment regarding its relationship with Project NOLA. Kirkpatrick, the police superintendent, told the Washington Post earlier this week that her agency had launched a review of officers’ use of alerts provided by Project NOLA, the accuracy of the information the group provides and how the partnership fits within city rules.
Lagarde said Project NOLA has aimed to be transparent with the New Orleans community about its work, including by partnering with locals to put up its cameras and posting about its work on social media.
“All of our data is on-network, which means it comes from our own network of cameras. Our cameras are on people’s homes, business, churches, schools… The facial recognition is not being paid for by tax dollars. It is not accessible directly by law enforcement,” he said. “So, you know, we are the gatekeepers. We check everything that goes into the system make sure it’s valid.”
