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New Orleans Police Reportedly Used Real-Time Facial Recognition Alerts Supplied by Project NOLA Despite Local Ordinance

May 19, 2025

The Washington Post reports that New Orleans police received real-time facial recognition alerts from a privately operated network (Project NOLA), resulting in numerous arrests. This alleged use of AI seems contrary to the 2022 city ordinance restricting facial recognition to post-incident investigations only. Authorities are said to have been less than transparent about employing such technology.

Controversies like these underscore the need for responsible AI governance and trustworthy practices. Join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum to help establish guardrails for safe and secure AI usage, contributing to our AI incident database and shaping harm prevention strategies.
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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
project-nola, new-orleans-police-department
Alleged developer
dahua-technology, unclear-facial-recognition-technology-developer
Alleged harmed parties
arrested-individuals-in-new-orleans, residents-subject-to-live-surveillance-in-new-orleans, people-misidentified-or-at-risk-of-misidentification-in-new-orleans, general-public-of-new-orleans

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1075

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.