[Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO reveal the practice
failed to identify suspects a majority of the time and is
disproportionately used against Black people. ]
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‘WHOLLY INEFFECTIVE AND PRETTY OBVIOUSLY RACIST’: INSIDE NEW
ORLEANS’ STRUGGLE WITH FACIAL-RECOGNITION POLICING  
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Alfred Ng
October 31, 2023
Politico
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_ Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO reveal the practice
failed to identify suspects a majority of the time and is
disproportionately used against Black people. _

, illustraiton/Photos by AP

 

In the summer of 2022, with a spike in violent crime hitting New
Orleans, the city council voted to allow police to use
facial-recognition software to track down suspects — a technology
that the mayor, police and businesses supported as an effective, fair
tool for identifying criminals quickly.

A year after the system went online, data show that the results have
been almost exactly the opposite.

Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO show that computer facial
recognition in New Orleans has low effectiveness, is rarely associated
with arrests and is disproportionately used on Black people.

The first facial recognition search under the new policy occurred on
October 21, 2022, using surveillance footage to help identify a Black
man suspected of a shooting by matching his picture with a database of
mugshots. The results: “Unable to match, low quality photo.” Over
the next year, the NOPD would see a string of largely similar results.

A review of nearly a year’s worth of New Orleans facial recognition
requests shows that the system failed to identify suspects a majority
of the time — and that nearly every use of the technology from last
October to this August was on a Black person.

Although it has not led to any false arrests, which have happened in
other cities
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the story of police facial identification in New Orleans appears to
confirm what civil rights advocates have argued for years, as police
departments and federal agencies nationwide increasingly adopt
high-tech identification techniques: that it amplifies, rather than
corrects, the underlying human biases of the authorities that use
them.

“This department hung their hat on this,” said New Orleans
Councilmember At-Large JP Morrell, a Democrat who voted last year
against using facial recognition and has seen the NOPD data. Its use
of the system, he says, has been “wholly ineffective and pretty
obviously racist.”

 

[People raise their fists during a rally outside Jackson Square in New
Orleans.]

New Orleans was among multiple cities that passed facial recognition
bans in 2020 following protests over the death of George Floyd, a
Black man killed by Minneapolis police officers. | Gerald Herbert/AP

Facial recognition has many uses — you can use it to unlock your
phone, to help find yourself in group photos and to board a flight.
But no use of the $3.8 billion industry
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concerned lawmakers and civil rights advocates more than law
enforcement.

Much criticism has focused on the technical side
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how facial-recognition systems work. Once trained to match faces, they
compare photos captured from surveillance cameras to an existing
database of arrest photos — in New Orleans’ case, provided by the
state police. Many researchers have warned that facial recognition is
technologically biased against Black people, because it’s largely
trained on white faces; and that it’s ineffective at promoting
safety, as crime rates tend to remain the same with or without the
technology in place.

But the New Orleans records reveal there’s a human element as well:
A system can land unfairly on the community because it’s selectively
used on a particular group.

Lawmakers of both parties on Capitol Hill
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attempted to pass regulations
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how police can use facial recognition for years, but have yet to enact
any laws on the subject. Some state lawmakers have also tried to limit
facial recognition, but so far have only been able to pass limited
rules, like those preventing its use on body cameras in California
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its use in schools
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New York. A few cities with progressive-leaning politics, such as San
Francisco and Portland [[link removed]],
have fully banned law enforcement use of the technology.

For two years, New Orleans was one of those cities: In the wake of the
George Floyd protests, its city council outlawed police use of facial
recognition from December 2020 to October 2022.

In the year since the ban was lifted, the NOPD has sent 19 facial
recognition requests, according to the records. Those requests were
for serious felony crimes, including murder and armed robbery. Two of
them were canceled because the city’s police already identified the
suspect before the search results came back, and another two were
denied because the crimes committed were not eligible for facial
recognition use.

In the 15 facial recognition requests that actually went through,
records show that nine of them failed to make a match. And among the
six matches, three of them turned out to be wrong.

Only one of those 15 requests was for a white suspect.

The first and only arrest based on facial-recognition technology
occurred in September, 11 months after the New Orleans City Council
lifted the ban.

“The data has pretty much proven that advocates were mostly
correct,” said Morell, the city councilor. “It’s primarily
targeted towards African Americans and it doesn’t actually lead to
many, if any, arrests.”

Politically, New Orleans’ City Council is split on facial
recognition, but a slim majority of its members — all Democrats —
still support the technology’s use, despite the results of the past
year. So do the police, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and a coalition of local
businesses.

[Eugene Green reads a statement.]

New Orleans City Council member Eugene Green supports the NOPD's use
of facial recognition and introduced the measure to unban the
technology in 2022. | Photo by Sophia Germer/NOLA.com, The
Times-Picayune, The New Orleans Advocate

City councilor Eugene Green, who introduced the measure to lift the
facial recognition ban in 2022 and was one of four council members to
vote for it, said he still supports law enforcement’s use of facial
recognition for the foreseeable future.

“If we have it for 10 years and it only solves one crime, but
there’s no abuse, then that’s a victory for the citizens of New
Orleans,” said Green, who is Black and represents a majority Black
district.

The New Orleans Police Department, presented with POLITICO’s
analysis of the data, did not respond to questions on the statistics,
but argued that the data shows the agency is following guidelines for
using facial recognition. The fact that there were no arrests based
solely on positive matches showed that investigators didn’t rely on
the technology alone, and sought corroborating evidence, the NOPD said
in a statement.

CASE REPORTS FROM THE THREE FALSE MATCHES IN NEW ORLEANS

#1
In a search for a gunman last November, the facial recognition
software returned a match that police discovered was wrong after
identifying the real suspect through monitoring jail calls, according
to the log records.
 
#2
In a homicide investigation in April, police received a match for a
suspect whose photo was provided by a tipster. Police later learned
that a person matched from the picture wasn’t even in the area
during the murder.
 
#3
Police investigating an aggravated assault in February sent a facial
recognition request to the state police and received a match for a
potential suspect. In this case, New Orleans police found the alleged
attacker through investigative work without the help of facial
recognition. There’s no explanation for the misidentification here,
with the logs simply stating, “A subsequent incident revealed the
perpetrator was not the subject identified through FRT.”

The department also disagreed with the City Council members’
argument that its usage of facial recognition is racially biased,
saying its officers are trained to conduct bias-free investigations.

“Race and ethnicity are not a determining factor for which images
and crimes are suitable for Facial Recognition review,” an NOPD
spokesperson said when asked about the racial disparity in its use of
facial recognition.

Watching the watchers

THE REPORTS ARE AVAILABLE because of a transparency law unique to New
Orleans. When the city council reinstated facial recognition as a tool
in 2022, it added a set of guardrails, including a requirement that
the police document and report their facial recognition requests to
the City Council — something no city had done before.

Facial recognition is popular with both police and the public, but has
been shadowed by poor disclosure requirements that make it hard to
judge its effectiveness.

The three largest police departments in the U.S. — New York, Chicago
and Los Angeles — all use facial recognition, as did Washington,
D.C.’s police until 2021
[[link removed]].
A Government Accountability Office survey in 2021
[[link removed]] found that 20 out of 42
federal law enforcement agencies use the technology.

A Pew study in 2022
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that most Americans consider law enforcement’s use of facial
recognition a public good — even though most believe it won’t
reduce crime rates.

However, relatively little data is available on how well it works in
practice.

[A video surveillance camera above a subway platform.]

A surveillance camera in a New York City subway station. Many police
departments across the U.S., including the New York Police Department,
use facial recognition. | Mark Lennihan/AP

The New York Police Department, one of the largest in the U.S., had
used facial recognition since 2011, but only disclosed in 2019 that
its facial recognition system made 2,510 potential matches out of
9,850 requests
[[link removed]] that
year. It did not share how many of those matches were false positives.

A 2019 catalog
[[link removed]] created
by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the
Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute instructed police to
publicize the effectiveness of facial recognition, but did not offer
any guidelines on providing transparency about the technology’s use
to the public.

A handful of private companies offer their facial recognition for
police departments, none of which have disclosure requirements. New
Orleans uses the facial recognition system run by the Louisiana State
Police, which uses IDEMIA, a French software company.

Asked about its work with the Louisiana State police, an IDEMIA
spokesperson said its software was an “efficiency and accuracy
improvement” for law enforcement agencies. “We stand by the
technology and the training and the assistance that we give to law
enforcement across the country that are utilizing it,” the
spokesperson said.

In New Orleans, when police asked the City Council to lift its 2020
ban, lawmakers asked if they had the data to back up their requests.
The NOPD told the City Council that it did not keep track of how it
was using the technology, or how useful it was for investigations.

Under its new law, New Orleans requires a suite of details on the
entire process: the officer who made the request to use facial
recognition, the crime being investigated, a statement of reasonable
suspicion to justify the request, the suspect’s demographic, the
supervisor who approved the request, any matches and the ultimate
result of that investigation.

The police are required to provide monthly reports with those details
to the City Council, though in practice, the department has had an
unofficial agreement with the City Council to share the data
quarterly. POLITICO obtained these reports through public information
requests.

“We needed to have significant accountability on this controversial
technology,” said council member Helena Moreno, who co-authored New
Orleans’ original ban.

The city didn’t have to wait long after restoring the system to
learn that facial recognition wasn’t helping solve crimes.

[Members of the New Orleans Police Department investigate a carjacking
scene.]

New Orleans police investigate a carjacking. New Orleans regulations
only allows the use of facial recognition for violent crimes,
including murder, shootings and carjackings. | Max Becherer/The
Times-Picayune via AP

The first quarterly report, between October and December, showed six
requests for facial recognition — half of which resulted in no
matches, and one false positive. The other two matches are still
ongoing investigations nearly a year later.

The second report, showing requests from February to March, also
favored poorly: three results with no matches, and another
misidentification.

In a meeting on April 5, just 15 days before the NOPD’s facial
recognition would make another misidentification, Morrell took aim at
the bleak results.

“This council took it upon faith by the administration and a variety
of non-public organizations that this was an absolutely necessary
thing that we had to have,” he said. “And thus far, we have no
proof that it’s actually done anything.”

Jeff Asher, a criminal justice consultant hired by the New Orleans
City Council, reached the same conclusion after reviewing the data for
the city’s lawmakers.

“It’s unlikely that this technology will be useful in terms of
changing the trend,” he said in an interview in September. “You
could probably point to this technology as useful in certain cases,
but seeing it as a game changer, or something to invest in for crime
fighting, that optimism is probably misplaced.”

Deepening disparities

ALTHOUGH THE NEW ORLEANS system hasn’t yet led to any known false
arrests, one expert who has done a nationwide study says that police
use of facial recognition can quickly start to have real-world impact
on citizens.

Georgia State University’s Thaddeus Johnson published a research
paper
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October that found police departments reported a 55 percent increase
in arrests of Black adults after they started using facial
recognition, while having a 21 percent drop in arrests of white
adults.

Johnson, who is also a former Memphis police officer, said he didn’t
have enough data to make a causal link between the introduction of
facial recognition and the increase in arrests of Black adults across
multiple police departments.

[Members of the New Orleans Police Department help clear Bourbon
Street.]

Data between October 2022 and September 2023 shows that New Orleans
police have only made one arrest with facial recognition's help since
the agency started using the technology again. | Chris Graythen/Getty
Images

One potential explanation, he said, is that facial recognition systems
rely on criminal databases that are already heavily skewed toward
non-white people — meaning that software asked to find
“suspects” would be drawing from a database of majority Black
people.

“If you have a disproportionate number of Black people entering the
system, a disproportionate number being run for requests for
screenings, then you have all these disproportionalities all
cumulatively building together,” he said.

In nearly every publicized case of a false arrest based on facial
recognition
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the victim was Black. Twice, Detroit police have arrested a Black
person based on a wrong facial recognition match, including a pregnant
woman accused of robbery and carjacking. (Detroit’s police chief,
James E. White, told the New York Times “We are taking this matter
very seriously
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In 2020, a Detroit police department report on its facial recognition
use disclosed that the technology was used on Black people in 97
percent of cases
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reflecting the racial bias that New Orleans’ data also showed.

The City Council members against facial recognition in New Orleans
said that they are still outnumbered by the technology’s supporters,
and the data hasn’t changed opinions on the tool.

Morrell said that he does not intend to reintroduce a ban without
having the necessary votes, noting that there are other political
crises in New Orleans that the City Council must address first, like
increasing property tax rates and the search for a new police chief.

But he’s prepared to challenge any new police chief candidate who
backs facial recognition.

“If you are one of the people that ends up being a finalist for
police chief,” Morell said, “are you going to continue to beat
this drum?”

_Alfred Ng is a privacy reporter at POLITICO. His beat includes
coverage of government surveillance, consumer privacy and tech policy.
He previously worked at The Markup, CNET and the New York Daily News._

 

 

 

* facial recognition
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* New Orleans
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* racial bias
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