Difference between revisions of "NOLA Public Safety Plan"
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Revision as of 16:32, 26 January 2023
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Criminal investigations, Surveillance, Crowd management
| Summary |
|---|
| 0 |
Products and Institutions:
Status and Events:
| Status | Stopped |
|---|---|
| Events | Start (2 December 2017, Documented, , No description) |
| Start Date | |
| End Date |
Users:
Location:
| City | New Orleans (LA) |
|---|---|
| Country ⠉ | USA |
Description[ ]
The City of New Orleans has a wide variety of surveillance tools. Some have been allegedly stopped, there are also new plans for smart technologies that have been stopped. The use of BriefCam was allegedly stopped in 2019. However, the current extent and usage of the camera network is not exactly known. It was not dismantled.
In 2017, New Orleans began deploying mass amounts of surveillance hardware. The city's fleet of cameras and license plate readers has steadily grown every year since 1
“There was no real community engagement around these cameras, it just happened,” said Green, a member of the local anti-surveillance coalition Eye on Surveillance. “We noticed a camera above our garden space and wanted to begin investigating.” The cameras began popping up across town in late 2017 as part of a $40 million public safety plan that also included a fleet of license plate readers and a state-of-the-art surveillance hub called the Real Time Crime Center. Since then, local advocates like Green have been working to track and expose the city’s surveillance capabilities 1
New Orleans’ surveillance apparatus isn’t so much a comprehensive system as it is a sprawling, decentralized and constantly changing patchwork of tools maintained by various city departments, semi-independent agencies, private nonprofits and federal and state law enforcement 1
Despite all the muddiness, the city drew one clear line in the sand early into the camera program: it wouldn’t use facial recognition. For over two years, officials repeatedly assured the public of that voluntary restriction. It’s even written in bold on the city’s website and included in the privacy policy for the Real Time Crime Center. It was a rare point of clarity in an otherwise opaque surveillance system. Except it wasn’t truen1
New Orleans has steadily grown its surveillance hardware year after year. By late 2018, the Real Time Crime Center had access to a little over 300 live camera feeds. By the end of 2019, it was up to roughly 600. And by early 2021, there were nearly 1,000. Meanwhile, in August, the city announced it was using $1 million in federal coronavirus relief aid to buy 150 to 160 more license plate readers 1
Public pressure forced the City Council to drop a controversial ordinance in 2018 that would have forced every alcohol vendor in the city to install surveillance cameras directly connected to the Real Time Crime Center. The same year, when the NOPD’s use of the Palantir software caused a public backlash, the city announced it wouldn’t renew the contract. And soon after the NOPD admitted it was using facial recognition in 2020, the City Council banned the use of facial recognition. But the public rarely gets any advanced warning of new surveillance initiatives. Expansions are often simply announced, rather than brought up for public debate. Other times the public is never informed at all 1
The monitoring center captures video footage from strategically mounted cameras and license plate scanners and provides real-time intelligence to the New Orleans Police Department, Fire Department, EMS, and New Orleans Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP) and their public safety partners. The center supports the work of incident commanders in the field, providing critical information to quickly assess emergency situations and make informed decisions about keeping New Orleans safe in real-time. Since the center opened in November 2017, BriefCam’s video analytics platform has been used on a daily basis and credited in more than 100 cases where it has helped local police and fire departments to solve crimes, manage crowd control, improve pedestrian traffic flow, and investigate security events. BriefCam is deployed together with its VMS technology partners, Genetec and Milestone 2
Meanwhile, although the City Council abandoned the smart cities pilot program, the city is moving ahead with an even bigger version of the project. It recently selected a contractor to implement a broad smart cities program that would, according to the contractor’s proposal, include 3,000 smart street lights, each of which would have at least two cameras 2
There are plans in the works for smart city developments. The mentioned contractors have the ability to deploy facial recognition technology or are commonly used video platforms for the deployment of such technology.
New Orleans’ “smart cities” project has fallen apart in recent months, after allegations of contract-fixing and self-dealing prompted a formal City Council investigation and the seizure of at least one city official’s computer by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General. The selected contractors have dropped out, and it is effectively dead in the water. But there is a second, related $3 million city WiFi project that hasn’t yet been shelved. And records obtained by The Lens show that it’s embroiled in many of the same conflicts of interest that sank the larger smart cities project 3
In a statement, Cambium’s Chief Marketing Officer Mary Peterson said that “as a result of existing deployments in the City of New Orleans, we were invited to do design work for a small number of Proof of Concept projects.”A Cambium spokesperson declined to clarify who exactly invited Cambium, and whether it involved either Qualcomm or Ignite Cities — a “pro bono” consultant and Qualcomm business partner that worked with the city on the smart cities bid. They also declined to explain whether the “proof of concept projects” were related to the public bid for Cambium equipment, or what “existing deployments” they were referring to 3
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This page uses the following references:
- Security_Vision_Wiki_References#_SCITE473dcbce540ff9e98055d42b2a38cc85
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References
- a b c d e f g "Neighborhoods Watched". (2021) <https://surveillance.thelensnola.org/> Accessed: 2022-06-28
- a b c "New Orleans Real-Time Crime Center relies on BriefCam video content analytics platform to improve public safety". (2018) <https://www.police1.com/police-products/police-technology/police-software/facial-recognition/press-releases/new-orleans-real-time-crime-center-relies-on-briefcam-video-content-analytics-platform-to-improve-public-safety-pPtRLWH7f8sMGBmd/> Accessed: 2022-06-28
- a b c "Potential conflicts found in another city tech deal after collapse of 'smart cities' project". (2022) <http://thelensnola.org/2022/05/25/potential-conflicts-found-in-another-city-tech-deal-after-collapse-of-smart-cities-project/> Accessed: 2022-06-29