New Orleans police secretly used a live facial recognition program to identify suspects in real time despite a 2022 city council ordinance that limited use of the software to suspects in the police’s investigations of violent crimes, according to an investigation published Monday by the Washington Post.

New Orleans since 2023 has relied on face-recognition-enabled surveillance cameras through its “Project NOLA” private camera network after the city council lifted the ban on the technology.

But they imposed guardrails on its use, maintaining a ban on the technology as a surveillance tool. Police flouted those guidelines, constantly monitoring the more than 200 cameras across New Orleans equipped with the software for wanted suspects.

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