In a statement, LaTonya Nelson, a spokesperson for New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that, “By policy, facial recognition software is not used in the city’s Real-Time Crime Center.” However, she added that other law enforcement agencies can request archive footage that has been uploaded to NOPD’s digital evidence platform. When another agency makes a request, Nelson said, “the respective agency is obligated to comply with their agency’s policies and procedures.”

The process, as described by Nelson, is murky at best. Though New Orleans city officials insist that local law enforcement does not use facial recognition, the French Quarter investigation suggests that the NOPD has back-channel access to the state’s facial recognition program.

That has privacy advocates alarmed. Bruce Hamilton, an attorney with the Louisiana chapter of the ACLU, says that New Orleans officials have been “a little disingenuous” in making public statements about the city’s facial recognition position.

“Even if NOPD aren’t using [facial recognition technology], but they’re sending out the images — where is there control against government abuse and accountability?” he asked.

Evan Greer is the deputy director of digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future, which has called for a full federal ban on all law enforcement and government use of facial recognition surveillance. Greer said that there is “a long history” of law enforcement agencies sharing data with each other, or performing surveillance operations on each other’s behalf.

“These types of partnerships, fusion centers, and other programs have often been used to circumvent local democratic oversight of surveillance practices, or to use surveillance tools that were intended only for “emergencies” for routine policing,” Greer said.

“These types of partnerships, fusion centers, and other programs have often been used to circumvent local democratic oversight of surveillance practices.”

Police departments are often a part of local, state, regional, and federal networks that share biometric data. Historically, that meant sharing fingerprint images. But some of these networks are now sharing images used for facial recognition programs. In California, for example, local police departments share biometric images with other local departments, the state department of justice, other states in the region, police departments across the country, and the FBI.

The Louisiana Fusion center — known as the Louisiana State Analytical and Fusion Exchange, or LA-SAFE for short, was established in 2008. According to LA-SAFE’s website, a fusion center is defined as a “collaborative effort of two or more agencies that provide resources, expertise, and information to the center with the goal of maximizing their ability to detect, prevent, investigate, and respond to criminal and terrorist activity.”

On its website, LA-SAFE lists several of its partners, which includes national organizations like Customs and Border Patrol and the FBI, as well as local law enforcement like the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Department. The New Orleans Police Department is not listed as a partner on the website.

The only mention of facial recognition on the LA-SAFE website can be found on a linked PDF within the organization’s privacy policy. In that document, facial recognition is listed in the ‘Use Limitation’ section among a set of “individual identifiers” that LA-SAFE may use to identify the subject in a criminal investigation.

In response to queries seeking clarification about how New Orleans police and the state police collaborate in using facial recognition to investigate cases, a state police spokesperson said they “cannot comment on current investigative tools and techniques.”

The Louisiana ACLU said that the 2018 French Quarter mugging case was the first time their organization saw hard evidence of NOPD tapping the state’s facial recognition technology. “We had heard some rumors” ACLU attorney Hamilton said. “We learned about the specifics through this case.”

The Louisiana ACLU discovered the case when the public defender working on behalf of the robbery suspect filed a motion challenging the probable cause used to arrest his client. The judge called for a hearing and both officers involved in the case — NOPD detective Aaron Harrelson and LA-SAFE state police technician Jordan Morris — took the stand, walking the judge through their investigation.

During his testimony, Detective Harrison insisted that he had not requested facial recognition be run in his case, and indicated that he was “not aware” that LA-SAFE was using the program in this investigation.

State technician Morris described combing through approximately 200 potential matches generated by the facial recognition program. After narrowing down a suspect through some manual visual scanning, she believed she had her match. “We just kind of look at and decide if it could be a possible lead,” she testified. From there, the match went to her supervisor, and then back to NOPD.

Walker Rick, the Orleans public defender representing the man charged, requested that the state turn over the rest of the results from the facial recognition search to the defense. An attorney for the state police informed the court that the unit does not save the results of its searches.

Ultimately, Rick’s client took a plea deal. Rick told OneZero that he was “alarmed” by what he believes is a “serious risk of an error” in how facial recognition is being used as it was in his client’s case.

“It’s one thing when it’s a computer making decisions and processing info — and I’m skeptical of that,” Rick said. “But when it’s a computer making decisions and processing info then filtered through law enforcement personnel making decisions, that was pretty scary.”

Privacy advocates are pushing for municipalities to ban facial recognition data collection by public agencies. They argue that data-sharing agreements within law enforcement networks, combined with the massive quantity of data available, make this technology particularly dangerous to civil liberties.

To date, three U.S. cities — Oakland, San Francisco, and Somerville, Massachusetts — have adopted such legislation. State-level legislation has also been introduced in Michigan, New York, California, and Massachusetts. Currently, there are no such bans being considered in New Orleans or at the Louisiana state legislature.

Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer says that episodes like the case in New Orleans underscore how complicated it is to effectively legislate facial recognition technology. City officials may claim they don’t use the technology, but shared databases make those claims moot. That, Greer says, is “the reality of government surveillance.”

“Once our sensitive personal data has been collected, it doesn’t stay put,” Greer said.