Does surveillance make us safer?

Clint Carter was suffering from diabetic nerve pain and waiting on a ride to the hospital when he was arrested in June 2018, he told The Lens in an interview that year. As he waited, he wasn’t aware that one of the city’s surveillance cameras was actively zooming in and watching him from one and a half football fields away.

The New Orleans Police Department was using one of its hundreds of crime cameras to coordinate a drug bust. They suspected that Carter was selling heroin. Surveillance footage showed three NOPD SUVs roll up in front of Carter, immediately put him in handcuffs and search him and the surrounding area.

“No narcotics were recovered in the vicinity,” according to the police report.

Although they didn’t find any drugs, the officers did find brass knuckles. Carter was booked on two charges — illegally carrying a weapon and trespassing. The police then took Carter to the hospital, where he was booked on a third charge — simple assault.

“The arrested subject took a hospital blanket and covered his entire body with it,” says the police report. “The officer had reasonable suspicion [Carter] could be attempting to discard narcotics.”

Officer Omar Rodriguez then “adjusted” the blanket so he could see Carter’s hands. But according to the report, officers had already searched the inside of Carter’s pants and found nothing.

“You know, it was cold in the hospital,” Carter said in 2018. “They had already strip searched me and didn’t find no drugs on me. So I was like, ‘Why can’t I get underneath the blanket in the heat, I’m cold. Y’all already stripped searched me and seen I ain’t got no drugs on me, so what’s the problem?’ ”

According to the police report, Carter “became irate,” chastising the officer and “swinging his right hand and pulling on his left hand.” Carter was, at the time, shackled to the hospital bed and the officer, according to the police report, was standing five feet away.

Carter was found not guilty on all three charges in November 2018. But Carter was on parole stemming from a cocaine possession charge in 2016. Even though no drugs were found, and even though he was found not guilty on three unrelated charges, the new arrest was a violation of his parole agreement, and he was sentenced to another three years in prison.

“I feel like I ain’t supposed to be in jail right now,” Carter told The Lens in 2018 during a phone call from the Avoyelles Correctional Center in Cottonport, about 3 hours northwest of New Orleans. “It was a false arrest. A false claim. And I feel like I’m in jail doing time for nothing.”

Only a Tool

Both supporters and opponents of the city’s rapidly expanding police surveillance and data collection capabilities often offer a similar argument: the technology enhances the police’s ability to do what it’s already doing.

“We all want our homes and our families to be safe,” said Dee Dee Green, an organizer with the anti-surveillance group Eye on Surveillance. “This idea that we need policing and surveillance tools to keep us safe, that security blanket is sold to all of us. For some people that's a reality, for others of us it's not.”

Green and other privacy advocates said that while some people may be comforted by increased police powers, for communities that have borne the brunt of police abuses, that prospect can be more of a threat.

“We have ample evidence that the criminal justice system in Louisiana is dismally structured,” said Ursula Price, the executive director at the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice. “We incarcerate the most people for a reason. We have the most overturned convictions for a reason. This is a horrible idea, to equip police departments we know are abusive with this kind of power.”

Anti-surveillance advocates argue that, as with the case of Clint Carter, surveillance can exacerbate existing injustices in the criminal justice system and compound the worst tendencies of the police.

“Let's be real with ourselves, do we want folks to have that greater efficiency before they're more ethical?” Price said. “Before they are actually driven by the mission we want them to be driven by? We would just be making oppression more efficient.”

New Orleans has a long, turbid history with both police abuse and gun violence. For years, New Orleans claimed the title of most murders per capita of any major American city. The violence has diminished in recent years, but the city consistently ranks as one of the five deadliest in the country. And many see police surveillance technology as a valuable tool in the fight against crime.

“You need to be looking for opportunities to improve public safety in terms of taking advantage of some of the advancements in technology,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, told The Lens.

Goyeneche, a former prosecutor, focused on how those tools can help the police stop some of the most serious crimes, like tracking a kidnapper with license plate readers, coordinating a response to an active shooter with crime cameras or identifying violent gang members with network mapping software.

He said the new technology and software are just enhanced versions of what the police have always done. He likened facial recognition to broadcasting a suspect photo and asking for citizen tips, both of which come with the risk of misidentification and racial bias.

“The fact that there are software systems that assist the police department doing that doesn't mean that it's automated to the point where common sense and experience isn't applied,” Goyeneche said. “The technology is only a tool.”

And according to Orleans Parish DIstrict Attorney Jason Williams, some surveillance tools can be helpful.

“There's a ton of technology I plan on using to prove cases over here at the DA's office,” he said. “If someone is using a weapon on city streets and it's picked up on a camera and I can access that camera, I'm going to use that as evidence.”

In January, Williams left his seat on the New Orleans City Council after being elected District Attorney. Williams was the most active critic of unfettered surveillance expansion when he was on the City Council, and ran a campaign for District Attorney focused on reform and decreasing incarceration.

Williams said that while some of the surveillance tools are helpful, he remained concerned about the unfettered and unchecked growth of the city’s surveillance capabilities. He said the city was failing to holistically measure the benefits of the technology with the risks they bring, from civil rights violations to police abuse to community distrust to expensive lawsuits against the city.

“We're not educating ourselves on the negative ramifications of some of this technology,” he said. “I believe we should all be worried about negligence or nefarious activity on the part of law enforcement.”

Anti-surveillance advocates say that it isn’t a matter of if the police will misuse mass surveillance systems, it’s a matter of when.
“It's not speculative,” said Brian Hofer, chair of the Oakland Privacy Commission. “There's been real world harm, real human rights violations, and it's generally from a lack of oversight and transparency.”

In 2014, a police camera operator in Northern Ireland was convicted of voyeurism after using the cameras to spy on a woman through her apartment windows for nearly a month. An officer in Washington D.C. was sentenced to prison in 2003 for an extortion scheme in which he collected license plate numbers of gay bar patrons and used police databases to find out more about them, like whether they were married. An investigation by the Detroit Free Press from 2001 found that over five years, 90 police officers had abused police databases to stalk women, threaten people and settle scores.

In New Orleans in 2018, police officers saw two crime cameras with NOPD logos installed on a public utility pole in Lakeview. But they weren’t owned by the city, and they weren’t authorized to be installed on public property. A neighbor told the police the camera was privately owned by Jeff Burkhardt — the vice president of the city’s camera supply and installation contractor. The camera was located closest to a house Brukhardt used to own, but which his wife took control of the year prior in a separation of property agreement, according to court records.

The day after The Lens contacted Burkhardt about the camera, it was no longer there. But the city never provided an explanation for what the camera was doing there or how it had been installed without city approval.

“Those questions haven't been answered,” said Marvin Arnold, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance.

Bad National Headlines

Ryan Berni was a deputy mayor under former-Mayor Mitch Landrieu and played a key role in implementing the $40 million public safety plan that set up the city’s surveillance camera and license plate reader system in 2017. The genesis of the plan, he said, were high profile shootings on Bourbon Street and in other tourist centers that were threatening the tourism and hospitality industry — a major economic driver for New Orleans.

“Bad national headlines,” Berni said. “The tourism industry leaders were very concerned about the economic impact the continued shootings would have.”

Berni said the plan was also motivated by a 2017 attack in London where a man drove a car into dozens of pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge, which, he said, made the FBI nervous about Bourbon Street as a potential target.

He said that the plan was driven by an overall “desire to secure the French Quarter” and a $23 million contribution from the city’s convention center — a publicly-funded, state-created body. Berni said the plan only expanded outside of the French Quarter and into other residential neighborhoods after demands from community leaders and elected officials.

"In that process of engaging other elected officials and the public, there was a cry for ‘don't just put this investment in the French Quarter, we need this in crime hotspots all over the city,’ from residents, business leaders, community groups. So the scope of the public safety plan, while initially narrowly focused on securing the French Quarter, expanded to a kind of more city wide endeavor.”

City officials have pointed out the residents from all parts of the city, including Black and working class neighborhoods, have called for increased police presence and surveillance.

“It’s a complicated issue,” Price said.

Many of the communities that have been historically over-policed and over-surveilled are the same communities that deal with the densest concentration of violent crime, Price said. For some, the devastating effects of gun violence is a more urgent issue than the growth of mass surveillance, which is often invisible to most of the public and can at times feel abstract by comparison.

“The folks more impacted by these problems, some of them are likely to be, if not pro-law enforcement, just want to see more law enforcement in their community,” Price said. “The problem is in this conversation, our sense of our options has been very limited on purpose. We've been told the only way is to harm people and their families by incarcerating them. That's the only way to prevent crime, that's the only way to have any just outcome after a crime. And that's just not true.”

[I still think it would be good to add a sentence or two here about the defund the police movement. Feels like that's pretty relevant and will give people an idea of what we’re talking about. And it shows another downside - opportunity cost of not spending that money on education, etc.]

“We need to be really thoughtful about what we're spending money on, especially when you think about these are going to be taxpayer dollars,” Williams said. “Coming out of covid might be a great time to press pause on this and put up some guard rails and do a deep dive on what exactly is going to come out of this technology.

Many anti-surveillance advocates point out that the effectiveness of crime camera and license plate reader systems at deterring crime is murky, especially when it comes to violent crime.

“I just think there's really no evidence to point to our city being safer because of this,” Arnold said. “Not only is surveillance not making us safe, we already see today that it's making us less safe.”

Although New Orleans crime camera system was sold as a tool to prevent terrorism and fight violent crime, those haven’been the primary uses of the technology.

“We're always told that these systems are a matter of life and death,” said Albert Fox Cahn, a New York-based anti-surveillance advocate. “We're told that it's being used to prevent terrorism or prevent the most shocking crimes that you can imagine. But in practice we see them being used for graffiti and shoplifting.

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Williams said that beyond actual or suspected instances of abuse, overly-intrusive surveillance systems can work against the goal of public safety by sowing distrust between the community and the police. He said that during his short tenure as DA, he was already facing the challenge of getting undocumented immigrants to report crimes and cooperate.

“They're scared to come forward to report a crime that's been done to them because they're scared they'll get deported. I'm fighting that battle right now.”

Rocío LASTNAME is an organizer with the New Orleans immigrant advocacy group Congreso de Jornaleros, and she says that the city’s surveillance cameras and capabilities keep some people in the immigrant community from getting involved in advocacy.

“It makes people limit their activities with groups like Congreso, it makes them feel like they can't get involved,” she said through a translator.

Immigration advocates and attorneys claimed that under former-President Donald Trump, the US Department of Homeland Security targeted immigration advocates for deportation and other harsh immigraiton enforcement measures.

Chris Kaiser, advocacy director for the ACLU of Louisiana, said that mass surveillance has the potential to change not just the nature of policing, but the nature of public life altogether.

“We're really concerned with the ways that developing surveillance technology has implications for all sorts of vectors of civic and political life,” he said. “As we see proliferation of cameras and software like facial recognition in all public settings, we do erode the possibility of public anonymity. And when you do that, you make it really hard for people to freely associate and express themselves, participate in political life. And that has disproportionate effects on people who are already marginalized.”

Kaiser pointed out the long history of US police surveillance on protests and civil rights movements, including in 2020 during the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In 2020, the Louisiana Illuminator reported that a state-level intelligence center called the Louisiana State Analytic and Fusion Exchange kept tabs on political events throughout the state, including Black Lives Matter protests.

In 2018, when Price was the acting deputy director of the Independent Police Monitor’s Office, she spoke about the importance of public space in New Orleans culture, and how mass surveillance could change it.

“Coming from Mississippi, one of the things I love about New Orleans is how Black people occupy public space here,” she told The Intercept. “In Mississippi, you gather privately. But here, with second line culture, with stoop culture, Black people are always occupying public space. This is a threat to all of that.”

Undated meeting notes from a city public safety meeting indicate that the city has used two of its portable cameras to intentionally intercept a second line parade, leading to “two gun arrests.”

Dirty data

New Orleans surveillance capabilities aren’t limited to just cameras and license plate readers. The system also includes advanced software, sometimes powered by artificial intelligence, that mine, organize and analyze data on the behalf of police.

Some people have promoted automated decision making in the criminal justice system as a way to avoid human bias. But in many cases, that isn’t true.

“There's this veneer of scientific or technical infallibility,” Hofer said. “It's a piece of plastic and software, it can't be racist. There's no bias in this, it'll make everything better if we take out the human element and turn it over to an algorithm. And I think we have enough horror stories to show that is very misguided.”

One well established example is facial recognition software.

A 2019 study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — a federal government agency — found that the majority of commercial facial recognition software was racially biased, misidentifying Black and Asian people at 10 to 100 times the rate of misidentification for white people. It found that misidentification problems were worst for Native Americans.

“So why can’t facial recognition identify dark-skinned people as well as light-skinned people?” Arnold said. “Well, if all the computer programmers who develop the software are white and light-skinned, they’re going to pick a bunch of light-skinned data. And these kinds of subtle implementation details are not something that’s ever going to be fixed as long as racism is around.”

New Orleans banned facial recognition in December, but the NOPD and at least one Council member are already working to roll back that restriction.

Another issue is what researcher and attorney Rashida Richardson referred to as “dirty data” in a 2019 paper in the New York University Law Review, which examined the use of biased data in predictive policing programs, including in New Orleans.

Automated police surveillance systems largely rely on police records, such as arrest records, jail phone logs, incident reports and field interview cards. The problem, Richardson argued, is that the data is skewed by historically biased police practices that made black people and people of color more frequent targets of stops, frisks, arrests and imprisonment by the police. That means for people of color and other targeted groups, there are bound to be more interactions with the criminal justice system regardless of their behavior — more data points that make them more vulnerable to this kind of data mining analysis.

In 2012, The Times-Picayune reported that one out of every seven Black men in New Orleans was either in prison, on parole or on probation.

“We already know the New Orleans police department has disproportionately targeted people of color in this community,” Price said. “And now we're equipping them with the technology that is focused on those same communities. So we're just gonna continue seeing the same problem.”

He said that those biases aren’t just discriminatory, they can distract against real public safety threats. The NYPD admitted in 2012 that after six years, the Demographics Unit hadn’t generated a single lead or led to a terrorismn investigation.

“Ninty Five percent of their investigations were targeted at muslim communities in New York at a time when the vast majority of terrorist attacks and extremisit attacks were coming form right wing extremists,” Cahn said. “I think the January 6 attack [on the US Capital] is a good example of what happens when you have this sort of systemic bias built into your threat models and your threat detection system so much you minimize the threat posed by white individuals.”

Police Reform

Berni, who helped set up the initial video surveillance system in New Orleans, says there is legitimate reason to be skeptical about how local law enforcement use advanced surveillance tools.

“I think there would be a huge agreement that policing has to be reimagined writ large,” Berni said. “And I think that's why there's been so much broken trust with communities here and across the country.”

But he pointed out that the NOPD has been under a stringent federal consent decree since 2013, after a Department of Justice investigation found routine civil rights infractions, biased policing constitutional violations at the hands of NOPD officers.

“NOPD’s failure to ensure that its officers routinely respect the Constitution and the rule of law undermines trust within the very communities whose cooperation the Department most needs to enforce the law and prevent crime,” the 2011 investigation said. “As systematic violations of civil rights erode public confidence, policing becomes more difficult, less safe, and less effective, and crime increases.

Berni said that federal oversight adds an extra layer of protection that most cities don’t have.

“The New Orleans Police Department is probably more closely watched and more closely regulated on its interactions with individuals and its use of data and technology than anywhere else in the country. So I think it is a fair concern to have about how police would use information. I think in the particular instance here, it's unwarranted."

The federal monitor leading oversight of the NOPD’s consent decree recently announced that he expected the NOPD to be in full compliance with the agreement by July. After that, the NOPD would enter a two-year “sustainment period” with continued oversight before the federal consent decree was lifted altogether.

“The real test of this consent decree isn't so much the next two years, it's the five years after the monitoring ends,” Goyeneche said.

Goyeneche pointed out that New Orleans had gone through a major overhaul effort in the 1990s under former NOPD Superintendent Richard Pennington. The department at the time was marred by corruption and abuse scandals, including X, X and X.

“After a couple years, the department fell back into their old ways of doing things,” he said. “So I think a lot of advancements were made in the first four years of Richard Pennington. Then victory was declared. And we began to backslide. And people didn’t realize how much we backslide before Katrina and Danzinger.”

When the consent decree ends, the main oversight body keeping the department in check will dissolve. Before the consent decree began, the city created the Office of the Independent Police Monitor. But the office has consistently complained that it doesn’t have the access, power or resources to effectively provide oversight.

“That's really taken a back seat post-Consent Decree, because the federal monitors have basically been front and center reviewing all of this,” Goyeneche said. “But once the Consent Decree is terminated in New Orleans, that's going to be the primary responsibility of the independent police monitor.”

Not just the NOPD

While some New Orleans residents remain wary of the NOPD, most would agree that the department is less corrupt, biased and abusive than when the consent decree began. But even if they did fully trust the NOPD, advocates say there are scores of other law enforcement agencies operating in Orleans Parish that they have to worry about as well.

For undocumented immigrants, the central concern is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under Landreiu’s administration, and while former President Donald Trump was ramping up immigration enforcement efforts, the NOPD created a policy that said officers couldn’t aid federal agents in enforcing immigration law.

But with the number of data and intelligence sharing arrangements the NOPD is part of, it appears likely that federal immigration officials can access NOPD data.

The Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange, or Fusion Center, acts as the central vehicle for local and state law enforcement to share intelligence and data with each other and with the federal government. The Fusion Center has a number of surveillance tools and databases available for qualifying law enforcement agencies. One of them is the NOPD’s internal records system.

“Data sharing between local state and federal law enforcement is incredibly dangerous,” Cahn said. “Something that really hasn't been appreciated as part of the sanctuary city movement is the need to prevent data transfers from state and local officials to the federal government.”

The city’s Real Time Crime Center, which monitors the city’s cameras and license plate readers, doesn’t just serve the NOPD. It serves a long list of agencies including the FBI, the Louisiana State Police, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and university police departments.

The NOPD recently adopted a new records management system with advanced analytics that will be integrated “natively with the Louisiana State Police” and will be available to any law enforcement agency in Orleans Parish, including the Levee District Police, campus police departments and other law enforcement agencies that were not included in the federal consent decree and don’t always have the same policies around things like use of force and high speed chases.

“Think about the amount of work and money that the City of New Orleans has put into reforming NOPD,” Price said. “And then we equip departments we know that don't meet our standards of constitutional rights or privacy with the same information we have. We're still leaving our people in danger.”

While privacy advocates are concerned about intentional data sharing, unintentional data leaks pose another serious issue.

“I really have no faith in the city's ability to keep the data even to themselves to start with,” Arnold said. “I'm also concerned about the city's ability, even if they weren't sharing it, to keep the data safe.”

In December 2019, New Orleans was hit by a cyber attack that locked the city out of its own data and systems. It took millions of dollars and over a year to fully recover. The city has since upgraded its cybersecurity software and procedures. But even then, it’s difficult to know when you’re fully protected. Cyberattacks, allegedly from Russian hackers, stole valuable information from federal departments with some of the country’s most sensitive data, including the Department of Homeland Security, just last year.

Maass said local governments, especially in smaller cities and towns, simply may not have the internal expertise to protect themselves as data collection and sharing technology gets more advanced and more complicated.

“Police departments don’t have tech company class cyber security professionals who are just locking down their system and doing security audits,” he said. “They're not investing in that.”

In 2015, Maass co-wrote a report about how three police departments just outside of New Orleans — St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, and the Kenner Police in Louisiana — had left their license plate reader systems completely exposed online.

“There were license plate readers where you could just go to a URL, on a website, and bring up the camera,” Maass said. “You could bring up the control, you could siphon off the data as it was coming in, you could watch the live footage. And nobody had actually done the actual investment to protect the software, no one had done the due diligence.”

Williams said he had similar concerns, comparing the city to a product consumer who blindly agrees to a long terms and conditions document.

“The same way you can click a box without reading a 40 page document, that same thing is happening with municipalities across the country as it relates to technology. So we gotta get in front of it. Even if it's not here yet, we need to start having conversations about the best way to use these things and what we don’t want them to do ever.”