This post was originally published on insomniac.tech on August 17, 2026.
I’ve spent the past year and a half documenting how NOPD surveils this city — public records requests, PIB complaints, and a growing stack of the department’s own documents. The record is no longer ambiguous. It’s time to put it in front of the New Orleans City Council with signatures behind it.
Sign the petition here.
What the record shows
Facial recognition. For roughly two years, NOPD officers received real-time facial recognition alerts on their phones from Project NOLA — a private network of roughly 5,000 cameras run by a former NOPD officer, built on Dahua hardware the FCC has banned from new sale in the U.S. over national-security concerns. That directly violated the city’s surveillance ordinance. When national media exposed the program, NOPD said it was “paused.” Meanwhile, the department claims it has zero records of a program its own district offices hosted monitoring stations for — and the alerts never appeared in the quarterly surveillance reports the law requires.
Drones. NOPD flew hundreds of drone flights in the first months of this year and left the required justification blank on about three-quarters of them. It has drafted policy language that would authorize weaponized drones. When I filed formal complaints about flights that violated NOPD’s own policy, the Public Integrity Bureau closed them without investigation.
License plate readers. NOPD uses automated license plate readers, and surrounding agencies across the metro run cameras from Flock Safety — the company building a nationwide vehicle-tracking network that law enforcement can search across jurisdictions.
And the network isn’t even staying local. Records I obtained show the state’s intelligence director was personally handed Project NOLA credentials — no contract, no oversight, no vote.
What the petition demands
Six things, but they reduce to three: investigate the facial recognition and Flock abuse on the record, cut the city off from Project NOLA entirely: no access, no alerts, no data, and put independent expert oversight over every NOPD surveillance contract and policy, because an agency that violated the ordinance, omitted it from mandated reports, and closed the complaints has forfeited the benefit of the doubt.
None of this is anti-public-safety. It’s the opposite: safety built on broken law and secret programs isn’t safety, it’s exposure for every resident whose face, plate, and location are sitting in databases nobody voted for.
What you can do
- Sign the petition. Takes 30 seconds.
- Share it: especially with anyone in New Orleans.
