"New Orleans, home of Bourbon Street revelry, has become the first American city known to have a live facial recognition network. How that came to be is a story of private initiative and political inaction, and may point to the future public safety uses of this surveillance technology. Police around the country routinely use facial recognition after a crime, to speed up the identification of suspects caught on camera."
"But live facial recognition, which can name and track a person moving around a city in real time, has been slower to catch on in the U.S. Aside from isolated experiments, police departments have shied away from the technology, fearing a backlash over privacy. In New Orleans, the technology was introduced by a private non-profit organization, Project NOLA, founded in 2009 by a former police officer named Bryan Lagarde."
""I was one of the people sitting in the hot car many years ago, taking pictures and videos of gangsters," he says. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, when the police department was severely under-staffed, he says it became obvious to him that the city needed more cameras. "I recognized early on that it can act as a force multiplier. A wonderful force multiplier.""
New Orleans operates the first known American live facial recognition network through a private nonprofit called Project NOLA. Project NOLA aggregates video feeds from over 5,000 cameras mounted on private property by volunteers who pay annual connection fees. In 2022 the network added live facial recognition capabilities, with about 200 advanced cameras able to match and track faces in real time. The system was developed after post-Katrina staffing shortfalls prompted increased camera deployment. The technology is intended to speed identification and act as a force multiplier, while broader police adoption has been limited by privacy concerns.
Read at www.npr.org
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