New Orleans Police Continuing to Use Live Face Recognition Despite City Law

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A troubling New Orleans face recognition program revealed by a Washington Post investigation last year continues to operate despite violating a city law and a claim that it has been paused, and is being used in more problematic ways than first reported, according to emails obtained through an activist’s public records requests. If allowed to stand, this one-of-a-kind program would represent an alarming new expansion of how face recognition is used in America.

Face recognition is used by a number of police agencies around the nation, but almost always to discover the identity of an alleged perpetrator who appears in a photo. New Orleans police officers, however, have used — and appear to be continuing to use —live face recognition through an organization called Project NOLA. That means that they can do:

• Real time monitoring. The systems operators can set the system to issue instant alerts when someone on a watch list appears on some of the system’s 5,000 camera system (the newer ones, which have face recognition functionality embedded within them).
• Search. The operators can also enter a name or image and pull up the video of every time the person appears in any of the recordings the system has made (Project NOLA says it retains them for 30 days).
• Tracking. The retroactive construction of a person’s movements across the city over time, which can be highly revealing of how they live their life.
• Relationship identification. Such a system also enables even more invasive social network analysis by tracking a person’s repeated co-appearances in a video with another person. There has been no reporting that Project NOLA is doing this in automated fashion, but it is one of the capabilities such a system can create, as we have discussed.

New Orleans police’s use of this system was secret for two years, the Post reported, and played a role in dozens of arrests, but those arrested were not informed of the unreliable technology’s use, and it violated a city law that permitted limited use of the technology in investigations but imposed guardrails and conditions, including a ban on its deployment as a “surveillance tool.”

Live face recognition has been activated in China and Russia, but, we think it’s fair to say, runs counter to American values and the views of Americans across the political spectrum. Few people want to live in communities where face recognition tags and tracks their every move, handing enormous new power to the government and inviting abusive uses against immigrants, activists, and anyone holding views disfavored by the powers that be. No one wants to live in a community where a simple computer error can send you tumbling into fraught and potentiallly dangerous police encounters. New Orleans police may think they’re only using face recognition against crime, but if and when the infrastructure is legitimized, it will inevitably be used in abusive ways.

Raising even more issues, Project NOLA is a private organization that:

• Has no contractual relationship with the NOPD.
• Cooperates closely but outside of official channels with individual New Orleans police officers, who use it through their personal phones or through calls, texts, and emails with Project NOLA staff.
• Received permission from the NOPD to install its private cameras on city property.
• Has installed cameras on the premises of many private businesses, which are purchased by the businesses or donors, and then become part of this network.
• Is financed through unclear sources of funding, though much of it is provided by private business.
• Appears to be tightly controlled by one man, former NOPD officer Bryan Lagarde, who owns and personally operates the system and whose board of directors is made up of a majority of Lagarde family members.
• Is immune from many of the checks and balances that we have evolved to limit the abuses of government agencies, such as open-records and privacy laws, because of its ostensible non-governmental status.

It is unacceptable for police officers to circumvent checks and balances and democratic accountability by using a private company to operate an arm’s-length surveillance technology that lies well outside the bounds of public acceptance (as reflected in the New Orleans city council’s law, and by the council’s consideration but ultimate refusal to enact a new law endorsing Project NOLA after it was revealed). More broadly, in my conversations with police and other government officials I have seen a nationwide recognition that, despite our disagreements, live deployment of this technology on the streets is outside the bounds of public acceptance and legitimacy.

Continuing use
Earlier this year, we were contacted by a privacy researcher, Matthew Wollenweber, who has filed complaints and obtained thousands of pages about this program from the New Orleans Police Department via open records requests.

Those records strongly suggest that face recognition is continuing in violation of New Orleans law. Emails obtained by Wollenweber confirm that at least as of November 2025 officers were continuing to send photos to Laguarde to locate suspects using the Project NOLA face recognition system in violation of New Orleans’s law after the supposed “pause” in the cooperation program. NOPD, Wollenweber told us, has become less responsive to open records requests. “They haven’t answered, I haven’t gotten any records past November. So they’re reluctant to share that. But the police department never ordered officers to stop using it — I checked that via public records.” While we don’t have proof, it is reasonable to presume that, if use of this program was ongoing in November 2025, seven months after its supposed pause, that its use continues today in the absence of indications to the contrary.

That assumption is further supported by the fact that the NOPD won’t admit that face recognition use even took place. Wollenweber filed a complaint against the officers revealed to be sending photos to Project NOLA, but the police department ludicrously claimed that the requests didn’t constitute a “use” of facial recognition technology, and dismissed the complaints. This despite a declaration from the city’s police chief Anne Kirkpatrick when the story broke last year that “We’re going to do what the ordinance says and the policies say, and if we find that we’re outside of those things, we’re going to stop it, correct it and get within the boundaries of the ordinance.”

In a November 5, 2025 email, LaGarde tells a NOPD detective that “Kirkpatrick visited my office yesterday, things went well, and I believe that we will soon be able to switch PN [Project NOLA] back on to the NOPD.” It’s unclear what he means by “switch PN back on,” because in the very next sentence he tells the detective that he has fulfilled her request and “reactivated your account.”

Other findings from the documents include:

• Back-tracing. NOPD officers are using Project NOLA to back-trace the movements and activities of suspects who are already in custody. One officer emailed the private organization that runs the system, “I would like to get him on video prior to the robbery wearing a beige cross style bag.” As Wollenweber points out, this enables fishing expeditions and warrantless retroactive searches for wrongdoing of people who have come to the attention of law enforcement (which could be not only due to evidence of wrongdoing but also via error or unlawful arrest at a demonstration).
• Terrible security. “The security on the system is completely terrible,” Wollenweber told us. He found it was sending videos of suspects over unsecured, publicly accessible Google drive folders, many of which he recently verified were still accessible. And “most of the cameras have a predictable password; the entire system to log in has no centralized identity management and they use shared passwords and accounts. They had that for years.”
• Irregular additions to watch list. “We don’t know who’s on the watch list; there’s no process for it, there’s no auditing, there’s no accountability. Hotlists are just whatever Bryan decides,” Wollenweber said. For example, he said, when an arrestee appears to be a gang member, Project NOLA staffers have looked for their associates on social media and just added their pictures to the hot list. “There’s no control there.”

Violating twenty-five years of wise restraint
In 2001, not long after the 9/11 attacks, the Tampa Police Department deployed live face recognition on the streets of a busy neighborhood. This was a time when vendors were pushing the technology with wildly overblown promises that it would stop the next terrorist attack. Using Florida’s open records law, the ACLU obtained the police logs of hits generated by this program, revealing that the system hadn’t succeeded in identifying a single person from the police database and made many errors. In response, the department admitted that because of its ineffectiveness, the software had actually not been used for months.

News of this failure helped discredit face recognition technology, and the post-9/11 push for it dried up. Since then, despite improvements in the technology, we have not seen an effort to introduce live face recognition in any US city* — until Project NOLA. That system needs to be stopped lest its adoption become the first step in normalizing a nightmarish level of surveillance in American life.

* Before the New Orleans report, there had been three small jurisdictions that we learned had deployed small numbers of face recognition cameras for public surveillance — but in each case, the purchases appear to have been made by local officials who were under the mistaken impression that such uses were not out of the ordinary, and two of the three quickly backed off deploying the tech upon learning just how radical such a deployment would be. Earlier, the cities of Chicago and Detroit had invested in similar technology but never turned it on, after realizing how much public opposition it would generate.