Insomniac Technologies

I’ve obtained another public records production from the City of New Orleans — request 26-651, 69 pages of email between NOPD officers and Bryan Lagarde of Project NOLA, the private nonprofit that runs a facial-recognition-equipped camera network across the city.

26-651_Redacted.pdf

What’s in it

The emails run from November 1 to November 30, 2025 — a single month.

Most of it is one thing repeated: an NOPD detective emails a private spy network a photograph of a person and asks that company to find them on camera and track. Mixed in are a handful of routine footage requests, a detective showing off a Project NOLA camera that can zoom in on a building 1.2 miles across the river, Lagarde volunteering to a homicide sergeant that his team has been “keeping very close tabs on gang members and associated vehicles for an upcoming operation involving LSP, FBI and NOPD,” and — the most recent email in the file — a detective reporting that he found a suspect “from my desk” using Project NOLA footage: “That is the power of crime cameras like yours.” Lagarde’s reply: “GREAT WORK!!!”

What NOPD did

Officers do not write the words “facial recognition” in these emails. They don’t have to. They send a face and a time window to an organization that scans faces.

Seven threads met the bar I use for complaints: the request came from an officer’s own @nola.gov address, and it asked Project NOLA to find or track a specific person.

• Det. Brody Bonura sent a photo of a crime victim “and the costume she was clad in,” described the suspect as “a black female, clad in an orange shirt with black lettering,” a “shot girl,” and asked for a search — after noting that “the victim is not exactly sure of the time and location.” Complaint. Three weeks later he sent “a picture of our victims” of an armed robbery and asked Project NOLA to look for two teenagers “described near them throughout the day.” Lagarde came back with video: “might this possibly be the perps?” Bonura: “Yes sir, we believe that’s them.” Complaint.
• Det. Raionda Edgerson sent a photo of two bike-theft suspects and asked Project NOLA to check a bar’s cameras in two windows that didn’t include the theft — because “I believe these guys may hang out at the Shamrock.” Lagarde searched, found nothing, and offered to “search again, should you happen to get a higher quality still shot.” Complaint.
• Det. Nico D’Alessandro sent seven images of a victim and the men he called “the alleged perpetrators,” described them by race, and asked Project NOLA to locate them. Lagarde tracked the victim across three cameras and offered his own theory of the case. When the trail went cold, D’Alessandro wrote: “I’m trying to track them at the RTCC right now, but progress is very slow. Maybe you can pick them back up?” Complaint.
• Det. John Huntington cited three timestamps to the second from a Bourbon Street camera, described two suspects as “B/M wearing the hats,” and asked: “Could you check to see if they’re on Bourbon Street throughout the day? I can’t seem to find them.” Complaint.
• Det. Donald Willyard sent six images tracing the perpetrator’s flight from a homicide scene, plus a photograph of the victim, asked Project NOLA to “observe the attached individual,” and later that day was pointed to a Google Drive folder: “we uploaded some footage from around the time of the homicide.” Both of Willyard’s request emails carry NOPD’s own footer warning that unauthorized disclosure “may result in both civil and criminal penalties.” Complaint.
• Det. Shanay Howard sent a camera still of a victim and an unknown woman and asked for “assistance with locating/backtracking the two subjects in the picture.” Lagarde asked what the signal was, then wondered whether it was an incident he’d gotten “a heads up about yesterday from one of our crime camera hosts.” Complaint.

An eighth complaint isn’t a search request at all. Det. Lucretia Gantner asked Lagarde to restore her Project NOLA account so she could “monitor certain areas during overnight hours,” adding: “I understand you said that the accounts have been frozen, but it appears that some accounts are still available.” Lagarde replied that “Kirkpatrick visited my office yesterday” and that “given emergency circumstances, I’ve reactivated your account.” When she wrote back that she still couldn’t see the cameras on Philip Street, he added them, “plus some others.” Complaint.

In five of the seven search threads, the photos NOPD sent included the victim — and in both of Bonura’s, the victim was the only person pictured. Five of the seven came out of a single district, the 8th — four of them from its Persons Crimes Unit. One officer appears twice in the same month. A detective sergeant from that unit was on two of the threads and, in one, replied to Lagarde: “Yes, I believe we are on the right track.”

The complaints

I filed one complaint per thread with the Independent Police Monitor, the Office of Inspector General, and NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau. All of them, with the underlying emails attached as evidence, are in the complaints folder.

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