Every day, I ride my bike down my block in Milan, a tight-knit residential neighborhood in central New Orleans. And every day, a surveillance camera follows me down the block.
Despite the rosy rhetoric of pro-surveillance politicians and facial recognition vendors, that camera doesn’t make me safer. In fact, it puts everyone in New Orleans at risk.
On Aug. 21, a live facial recognition ordinance was withdrawn by the New Orleans City Council, after months of community organizations fighting back and loudly opposing this dangerous ordinance. A council member's office confirmed that it was removed, pending edits, suggesting that a new one will be introduced. If this or a similar surveillance ordinance is approved, Louisiana would become the first state in the nation with a city-wide biometric surveillance network capable of tracking hundreds of thousands of residents in real time.
That’s not a step we want to take. Once invasive surveillance technology like that ends up in the hands of the government, there are no guardrails or oversight mechanisms powerful enough to protect our freedom and our privacy from bad actors, corrupt politicians, hackers, and anyone who doesn’t have our best interest at heart.
Expanding real-time facial recognition to all city cameras would set an unprecedented shift in mass surveillance for the whole country. It would build the infrastructure for a database that would record our facial features, personal characteristics, and our whereabouts, every time we stepped outside our front doors. All of that data, even if eventually deleted, can be used to train artificial intelligence to get better at recognizing and tracking us over time.
Disturbingly, a collection of cameras positioned across New Orleans is already capable of tracking residents’ every move, recording our data, and trying to match our faces to databases of millions of images of people. These cameras were never approved by the people of New Orleans. They were set up by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit group, which we now know because of bombshell revelations in the Washington Post. Project NOLA has been secretly spying on New Orleans residents with live facial recognition cameras for years. These cameras are at undisclosed locations around the city, and most importantly, police use of this technology has been outlawed since the local community rallied behind a surveillance ban in 2021.
Enough is enough. Time and again, New Orleans has been used as a testing ground for disempowering programs against our Black and brown communities––not only for secretive racist mass surveillance tech but also for a racist charter school system that has deteriorated our youth’s education. We have been treated as a sacrifice zone for oil, gas, and plastic plants to destroy our ecosystem and poison our health, causing us to have the highest rates of cancer in the country. We are not guinea pigs, and we are not disposable.
As an immigrant, I am desperately sounding the alarm about how devastating this surveillance ordinance would be for all New Orleaneans, including our migrant communities. All over the country, our people are being snatched off the street, our families are being separated, and in New Orleans, even our U.S. citizen babies with cancer are being deported. If we roll out real-time facial recognition in New Orleans, we have to expect that our facial recognition data will be demanded by ICE, requested by Louisiana police, or even hacked by anti-immigrant groups—empowering Trump’s agenda of terrorizing and violating our immigrant communities' fundamental human rights.
Instead of doubling down and investing in costly, racist technology, we should refocus on the root causes of crime and harm. 26% of all adults in New Orleans have low literacy levels. At 22.6%, our poverty rate dwarfs the national average of 10%. Dystopian face surveillance doesn’t solve those problems, but it does put us all at risk. The good news is we already know how to do better. Just last week, The Advocate editorialized about the many community programs and nonprofit efforts that are successfully reducing crime in Louisiana year by year.
Our elected officials have a duty to their constituents: to protect our freedoms, defend our dignity, and keep us safe. Our problems can’t be solved with more cameras and surveillance; they have deep systemic roots that have to be addressed.
Edith Romero is a Honduran community organizer with Eye On Surveillance, a researcher, writer, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.
