new York
Cnn
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A few minutes after the police from the state of Louisiana learned on Friday morning that 10 detainees had escaped A New Orleans prison, two of which were identified on facial recognition cameras in the French city district. The police arrested one of the escapees shortly after; the other, a few days later.
The cameras were part of a network of around 5,000 exploited in the city by the NOLA non -profit project, 200 of which are equipped with facial recognition technology. The state police had shared information on the jailbreak with the organization.
The incident marks a victory for the organization, the network of cameras of which would be unprecedented in the United States. The group is emblematic of an increasing push – although controversial – to use facial recognition technology to help resolve crimes.
“This is the exact reason why facial recognition technology is so critical,” said New Orleans police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick at a press conference earlier this week.
But as the adoption of the technology has developed, advocacy groups warn that it could undermine individual privacy. Worse still, inaccurate matches by facial recognition technology systems managed by police services elsewhere have led to false arrests in other cities.
In New Orleans, these concerns can be reinforced by the fact that the Nola project is independent of local law organizations – although it shares information with the police – and is therefore not necessarily subject to the same examination or the same responsibility.
“It is the state of authoritarian surveillance states and has no place in the American police,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, Deputy Director of the ACLU speech, confidentiality and technology project, in a project statement According to a Washington post report About the effort earlier this week.
But the NOLA project is a community company, said Executive Director Bryan Lagarde, supported by churches, schools, businesses and individual owners who, according to him, allow the group to place cameras on their properties and can remove them at any time.
“It was a community company from the start,” Lagarde told CNN. “If we never violate public confidence (the network of cameras) goes down instantly and effortlessly by the community that built it.”
The Nola project was created in 2009 to be A “force multiplier” for local law organizations, whose resources had been affected by Hurricane Katrina, said Lagarde. Today, the non -profit organization also operates 5,000 cameras in other cities in the country.
The Nola project takes images of sought -after suspects of “be looking for” alerts and feeds them in its “hot list” system. When its network of facial recognition cameras identifies potential correspondence, it sends an alert in real time to the police.
This is what happened on Friday, when two of the prisoners escaped went to the Nola Cameras project fell on local businesses in the French district of New Orleans. One was arrested shortly after. The other was followed in a housing complex where the Nola project has no cameras but was stopped on Tuesday thanks to the information provided by the Nola project on its probable location, According to the group.
Five escapes from Friday’s jailbreak remain in freedom.
The project Nola cameras were also used to investigate New Year’s New Year’s day’s Terrorism attacks New Year who killed 14 people. Lagarde refused to provide the name of the third company which makes the artificial facial recognition model that the group uses in its cameras.
As with many AI applications, there is no federal regulation as to whether and how AI can be used by local police. But a number of other cities have Prohibit the use of facial recognition By government agencies, including the police on concerns about their effectiveness and ethical implications.
Research has shown that technology is less effective in properly identifying women and people of color than white men, fueling concerns that technology gaps may have an oversized impact On historically marginalized groups. Given the history of racial prejudices within certain American police forces, “black and other people of color are more at risk of identification”, when facial recognition is introduced into the fold, Nicol Turner Lee and Caitlin Chin Rothman wrote in a Brooker in 2022 report.
CNN contacted NOPD to comment on its relationship with the Nola project. Kirkpatrick, the police superintendent, said Washington Post Earlier this week, his agency had launched an examination of the use of alerts by the officers provided by the NOLA project, the accuracy of the information provided by the group and how the partnership is part of the city’s rules.
Lagarde said that the Nola project was aimed at being transparent with the New Orleans community about his work, including by associating with residents to install his cameras and assignment on his work on social networks.
“All our data is on the network, which means that it comes from our own network of cameras. Our cameras are on people’s houses, business, churches, schools … facial recognition is not paid by taxes. It is not directly accessible by the application of laws, “he said. “So you know, we are the guards. We check everything that is going on in the system, make sure it is valid.”