‘Wholly ineffective and pretty obviously racist’: Inside New Orleans’ struggle with facial-recognition policing
In the summer of 2022, with a spike in violent crime hitting New Orleans, the city council voted to allow police to use facial-recognition software to track down suspects — a technology that the mayor, police and businesses supported as an effective, fair tool for identifying criminals quickly.
A year after the system went online, data show that the results have been almost exactly the opposite.
Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO show that computer facial recognition in New Orleans has low effectiveness, is rarely associated with arrests and is disproportionately used on Black people.
The first facial recognition search under the new policy occurred on October 21, 2022, using surveillance footage to help identify a Black man suspected of a shooting by matching his picture with a database of mugshots. The results: “Unable to match, low quality photo.” Over the next year, the NOPD would see a string of largely similar results.
A review of nearly a year’s worth of New Orleans facial recognition requests shows that the system failed to identify suspects a majority of the time — and that nearly every use of the technology from last October to this August was on a Black person.
