They’ll be watching Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras (and every other day)
By Chris Boyette, CNN
(CNN) — In cities across the United States someone or something is almost always watching you. On Tuesday, as Mardi Gras revelers flock to New Orleans to celebrate the end of Carnival, it will be no different.
Surveillance cameras are crucial for deterring and solving crimes, finding missing people and fighting terrorism in cities across the US, but a unique web of eyes is observing Bourbon Street.
Spawned in the aftermath of a natural disaster, Project NOLA, a community-based network in New Orleans and beyond is using its web of 10,000 security cameras to offer high-definition surveillance to dozens of law enforcement agencies serving communities from coast to coast.
What sets the nonprofit’s model apart is that their cameras are positioned on private homes and businesses and can be outfitted with facial recognition, license plate reading and clothing recognition software.
Some studies have shown that areas covered by surveillance cameras generally see significant crime reductions, but critics worry advanced facial recognition software violates the public’s right to privacy, and disproportionately targets people of color.
‘Everything was normal until it wasn’t’
Mere hours into the new year, the team at Project NOLA was focused on a shooting in Adams County, Mississippi – one of many cities and towns across the country where Project NOLA operates – when the phone rang.
It was a New Orleans police officer.
“Everything was normal until it wasn’t,” Project NOLA criminologist Bryan Lagarde told CNN.
“She told us that she was standing on Bourbon Street surrounded by injured and dead and that it was a terrorist attack,” Lagarde said.
Someone had plowed a three-ton pickup truck through crowds of New Years Eve revelers, killing 14 people and injuring dozens of others.
“We just went into full high gear,” said Lagarde.
The team began scouring footage from their cameras surrounding the French Quarter, tracing the movements of the Ford F-150: Where had it been before the attack? Did the driver have accomplices?
Police later identified the driver as Shamsud-Din Jabbar.
“Once the person – the driver – was identified, we started going back in time using facial recognition, clothing recognition to retrace that person’s footsteps,” Lagarde said.
When a Louisiana state trooper called to report he’d found an improvised explosive device in an ice cooler on the street, the search pivoted, looking for more coolers and anyone who touched them.
“We were having to work on the assumption that there may possibly have been more than one terrorist… over time we were able to learn it was one bad actor that did everything, but then of course we were looking at everybody.”
For weeks after the tragedy, Project NOLA continued to help law enforcement with the investigation by following up on leads, and fact-checking witness accounts against their recordings.
“This is the part that actually went on for a lot longer than a lot of people might realize as tips came into the FBI,” Legarde said.
‘After Katrina… we had to do something’
Project NOLA invokes the name of the city where it is based but the acronym stands for “National Online Law-Enforcement Assistance.” Lagarde, now its executive director, founded the initiative in 2010, but its impetus was New Orleans’ long struggle to rebuild and recover from Hurricane Katrina.
“When Katrina hit New Orleans, we lost a very large portion of the housing here, and as a result, we lost a lot of police officers. There was no place for them to live. We needed to do something now to act as a force multiplier,” Lagarde said.
A former police officer and district attorney’s investigator who spent many hours staking out suspects in the New Orleans heat, Lagarde says he taught himself about digital video cameras and writing more efficient computer code.
“I knew how well having crime cameras helped with solving crimes, so I put my expertise to work and created Project NOLA,” Lagarde said.
As a nonprofit, Project NOLA is independent of any one municipality and offers its base model cameras to would-be hosts free of charge and upgrades them every five years. Add-ons like facial recognition or license plate reading software are extra. Project NOLA also charges users a fee to host the footage on their private servers at the University of New Orleans.
Lagarde said 99 percent of the project’s funding comes from charitable donations and bequests.
“A vast majority of our cameras are on people’s homes, businesses, churches, and schools. It’s one of the things that helps sets apart how we operate,” Lagarde said. “It’s there to benefit law enforcement and public safety, but it’s on private property. It goes where the community wants the cameras, not where someone else decides where the camera is going to go.”
In 2016, Project NOLA partnered with the University of New Orleans which now houses the group’s National Real-Time Crime Center where cameras are monitored and simulcast to the municipalities and police monitoring stations the project serves, according to Lagarde.
Project NOLA itself only has a full-time staff of five people, Lagarde said, but they do their best to monitor certain areas and events. Otherwise, the local municipalities can monitor as they deem necessary.
“We might not be watching the fictional sleepy town of Mayberry, but their local police department and sheriff’s department might have the cameras up 24/7 with somebody watching them,” Lagarde said.
Overall crime in New Orleans dropped 23 percent in 2024 when compared to the average of the previous five years, according to police department statistics.
New Orleans Police did not specifically credit Project NOLA with the decrease, but in the department’s 8th District, which includes the French Quarter, the NOPD said that in late 2024 they had a 90-percent apprehension rate for violent crimes like shootings and armed robberies and investigators had solved every case they’d been assigned for the past four months.
CNN has reached out to the department for more information about how they work with the program.
The camera quality and sophisticated software used by Project NOLA makes for clearer, easier to use images, according to Lagarde.
“We use live facial recognition, so each one of our cameras, like the ones on Bourbon Street, they can scan up to 300-something faces per second,” he said, adding that advancements in tracking technology makes the cameras more effective.
“We can put a single camera on the corner of a building that’s at an intersection and with our cameras we can see faces two city blocks away, license plates in a 360-degree arc,” Lagarde said. “If you were to go into the French Quarter, you can tell which ones are ours because our cameras are constantly moving.”
‘If abused, it would be a very bad thing’
Project NOLA maintains what it calls a “hot list” of mug shots and information on wanted fugitives. As its cameras sweep an area, they are constantly comparing the passing faces to that list, according to Lagarde.
“So, if you’re walking down Bourbon Street and if you personally are not wanted, it’s going to scan your face and it’s going to completely disregard you, because you’re not wanted,” Lagarde said. “If you were wanted, then instantly in that same moment it’s going to send an alert to on-duty police officers.”
“On busy nights sometimes that will play out a couple times or a few times a day,”
As facial recognition technology advances and surveillance cameras become more sophisticated, the potential for abuse sparks alarm for some.
“Facial recognition surveillance, like Project NOLA, is racially biased and dangerously unreliable. Law enforcement boasts when the technology correctly identifies a suspect but stays silent when it falsely accuses innocent people – disproportionately Black individuals,” ACLU of Louisiana Executive Director Alanah Odoms told CNN in a statement. “Time and again, officials claim these tools are only used responsibly, but history proves otherwise. The public has no reason to trust Project NOLA or the agencies using it.”
Project NOLA said it prioritizes individual privacy, and its active facial recognition technology is very accurate. Lagarde said it is better for a nonprofit to be the steward of such capabilities than a police force or government.
“With the technologies that we use, specifically facial recognition, things of that sort, we’re certainly by far more comfortable with that funding coming from charitable organizations. That makes it a community’s choice if they want to do it or not versus just someone else deciding for them that it’s going to be done,” Lagarde said.
“If a community or a neighborhood doesn’t want it then they don’t host our cameras or they host our cameras and then don’t give us permission for us to use facial recognition, which is fine by us,” he continued.
This also means that being outside the government, Project NOLA isn’t subject to public records requests.
The raw footage and metadata from the project’s cameras had been automatically deleted and overwritten every 30 days, but since the Bourbon Street terror attack, Lagarde said the organization is increasing the retention time to two or three months in case investigators need to track a suspect back a longer time.
But even Lagarde acknowledged that a surveillance network like Project NOLA can be frightening to some.
“Realistically, there’s always going to be people who are going to be concerned, I mean, frankly the technology if abused, it would be a very bad thing,” he said.
The mysterious death of Adan Manzano
It wasn’t long after the New Years Eve attack that Project NOLA was brought into another high-profile case.
Adan Manzano, a 27-year-old sports reporter from Kansas City in New Orleans to cover Super Bowl LIX was found dead in his hotel room. His credit card and phone had been stolen.
Police have identified a suspect, and Project NOLA has been using its extensive network of cameras – Lagarde said there over 5,000 in the city – to help investigators develop a timeline of when Manzano was first seen in the French Quarter with the suspect to when she accompanied him to his hotel.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that Manzano was drugged before his death, Kenner Police have said. Project NOLA is assisting the police department in establishing a timeline and possibly the suspect’s mode of operation through video footage.
“We’re going 30 days back and we’re using facial recognition and clothing recognition to find earlier instances of the perpetrator and to see do we see activity indicative of a crime?” said Lagarde.
“Did we see where perhaps the perpetrator had to help the victim walk at some point, even though we didn’t see that person consume alcohol or we haven’t seen that person consume alcohol for some period of time?” Lagarde said. “Those are the type of things we’re helping with the cameras and to help establish the timeline.”
“We hope our contribution to the investigation will help bring some closure during this difficult time,” the group said in a social media post.
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