When New Orleans City Council reinstated facial recognition in their police department in 2022, it required a unique transparency law - police must document and report facial recognition requests.
There are already results. Unsurprisingly, the technology hasn’t been highly effective, has only resulted in one arrest, and disproportionately harms Black people in the city.
Like many other forms of technology, facial recognition does not solve but instead increases the range of anti-Black policing practices that existed long before the technology.
For example, the databases they pull from are already overpopulated by criminalized Black people.
93% of facial recognition requests made by New Orleans police since October 2022 were for Black suspects, even though only 58% of New Orleans residents are Black.
Data across the rest of the country is not promising. Georgia police departments reported a 55% increase in arrests of Black adults and a 21% drop in arrests of white adults after using the technology.
The NYPD’s facial recognition system made only 2,510 potential matches out of 9,850 requests in 2019.
With the implementation of facial recognition and other technologies, we are constantly under surveillance without our consent – and surveillance does not equal safety. At a minimum, we deserve full transparency surrounding the intent and impact of surveillance technology.
Let's advocate for safety practices not entrenched in anti-Blackness.