A 311 complaint was enough to bypass New Orleans City Ordinances and start the paperwork to install banned face-tracking camera.
January 15, 2025. A Third District NOPD officer is working a trash complaint — illegal dumping under the France Road overpass. She’d filed a 311. Sanitation said two to three months. So she emailed Bryan Lagarde, the former NOPD officer who runs Project NOLA, and asked whether a camera could go up “if we could figure out the funding with the city.”
His answer that evening:
“We would certainly love helping to place a camera at this location. However, due to the potential use of Facial Recognition technology, funding may need to be secured through private donations rather than city funds.“
That’s it. That’s the machine. Somebody dumped a mattress, and within hours a police officer and a private surveillance operator were working out how to put biometric scanning on a public street — and how to pay for it in a way the city wouldn’t have to disclose.
Not a murder. Not a carjacking. Trash.
The money is the workaround
Chapter 147 lets NOPD use facial recognition only for enumerated violent crimes, after the fact, through the state fusion center, with sign-off and Council reporting. It says facial recognition “shall not be used as a surveillance tool.”
Lagarde’s email explains, in one sentence, why none of that applies to him. City dollars make a city asset, and a city asset drags in Chapter 147 review, Council reporting, procurement, budget hearings, and public records law. Private dollars make a private asset that does the identical job for the identical customer and answers to nobody.
The Council can’t defund what it never funded. You can’t FOIA a nonprofit’s servers. And NOPD has argued its own requests aren’t a “use” of facial recognition at all — that’s how it dismissed the complaints filed over exactly this.
This is the department’s normal setting
Don’t mistake this for a lapse. Look at the pattern:
NOPD used facial recognition secretly for years while denying it, until The Lens caught them in 2020. The Council responded with a total ban. The ban got rolled back in 2022 into a narrow, heavily conditioned permission — and NOPD blew through that too, taking live alerts off Project NOLA’s network for roughly two years until the Washington Post caught them in 2025.
Caught, banned, permitted narrowly, caught again, paused, quietly restarted. Every time, the correction comes from a reporter — never from the department, never from PIB, never from the Council.
The France Road email is what that broken culture looks like on an ordinary Wednesday. Nobody in the thread flinched. Nobody asked whether a dumping complaint justified banned surveillance. The officer just replied that she’d go look for a business willing to host it.
