Facial Recognition Scandal: Who Polices the Police?
The short version: New Orleans ran a secret, rule-breaking facial recognition dragnet for two years, proving that 'oversight' means nothing without enforcement and public accountability.
Our Take
The Lab Tech Show lays out a damning timeline: NOPD quietly plugged into Project NOLA's camera network and ran live facial recognition across more than 200 feeds for two years, blowing past the very city ordinance meant to keep this tech on a leash — oversight boards, judicial sign-off, and use restricted to violent crime. That's not a technical glitch. That's a department deciding the rules didn't apply to it, and getting away with it until someone finally looked.
This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: a law gets passed to make surveillance tech politically palatable, then the policy quietly rots on a shelf while the cameras keep rolling. Facial recognition compounds every existing problem with ALPR networks and Flock-style camera grids — wrongful misidentifications hit Black and Brown residents hardest, there's no meaningful audit trail, and by the time the public finds out, the tracking has already happened. Secret two-year pilot programs aren't oversight, they're the absence of it.
Credit to The Lab Tech Show for surfacing this one. If you want to know what's watching your own block, check our camera map, and if your city council is debating a facial recognition or ALPR ordinance, don't assume a law on paper means a law in practice — push for real audits and public reporting through our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lab Tech Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.