Undisclosed surveillance with facial recognition in New Orleans

For The Washington Post, Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer report on a system that was in use for two years before inquiry:

Police across the country rely on facial recognition software, which uses artificial intelligence to quickly map the physical features of a face in one image and compare it to the faces in huge databases of images — usually drawn from mug shots, driver’s licenses or photos on social media — looking for possible matches. New Orleans’s use of automated facial recognition has not been previously reported and is the first known widespread effort by police in a major U.S. city to use AI to identify people in live camera feeds for the purpose of making immediate arrests, Wessler said.

It seems clear that facial recognition can be helpful in some cases. Problems arise when the systems go unchecked and everyone has to argue their innocence when out for a walk in the park.