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... Police around the country routinely use facial recognition after a crime, to speed up the identification of suspects caught on camera. But live facial recognition, which can name and track a person moving around a city in real time, has been slower to catch on in the U.S. Aside from isolated experiments, police departments have shied away from the technology, fearing a backlash over privacy.

In New Orleans, the technology was introduced by a private non-profit organization, Project NOLA, founded in 2009 by a former police officer named Bryan Lagarde.

"I was one of the people sitting in the hot car many years ago, taking pictures and videos of gangsters," he says. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, when the police department was severely under-staffed, he says it became obvious to him that the city needed more cameras. "I recognized early on that it can act as a force multiplier. A wonderful force multiplier."

He says Project NOLA acts as a kind of clearinghouse for video feeds from over 5,000 cameras that are mounted on the private property of "volunteers," who pay annual connection fees.

It's a massive amount of video, so in 2022 he added live facial recognition abilities.

"We're able to process more needle-in-a-haystack requests and see very successful results a lot faster," he says. "And we're less likely to miss something." ...