Police Corruption and Malfeasance
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras
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. Each time police want to scan a face, the ordinance requires them to send a still image to trained examiners at a state facility and later provide details about these scans in reports to the city council — guardrails meant to protect the public’s privacy and prevent software errors from leading to wrongful arrests.
Since early 2023, the network of facial recognition cameras has played a role in dozens of arrests, including at least four people who were only charged with nonviolent crimes, according to police reports, court records and social media posts by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit company that buys and manages many of the cameras. Officers did not disclose their reliance on facial recognition matches in police reports for most of the arrests for which the police provided detailed records, and none of the cases were included in the department’s mandatory reports to the city council on its use of the technology. Project NOLA has no formal contract with the city, but has been working directly with police officers.
“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who has closely tracked the use of AI technologies by police. “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.”
glhs837
Power with Control
Cop sits at light on phone, guy beeps. Cop comes back waving badge. Threatens guy with ticket. Guy asks for badge. Cop punches him in face, then leaves. Guy calls 911. Cop tells responding officers the guy yelled at him and he never hit the guy.
Plot twist, guys driving a company truck with an inside camera. It's all on video that the responding officers got to see before confronting the bad cop.