Surveillance and Data Protections Ordinance

1. This ordinance bans four technologies that infringe upon our civil liberties and have built-in racial bias. Facial recognition, stingrays, predictive policing, and characteristic tracking softwares like Briefcam have been implicated in human rights abuses both nationally and internationally, and are reactionary measures to crime prevention, at best. These proactive bans protect citizens from the many recorded harms of these technologies, such as the wrongful arrests of Robert Williams and Michael Oliver in Detroit because of false facial recognition matches. In a city with the nation’s highest per-capita number of wrongful convictions, these dysfunctional and racist technologies are a recipe for disaster. 
2. This ordinance proposes common sense data protections, all the more necessary after the $7 million cyber attack on City computers in December of 2019, highlighting the vulnerability of surveillance-based public safety plans in the hands of parties with ill intentions toward our city and its people. These protections also ensure that New Orleans remains a sanctuary city for the digital age and protects our undocumented neighbors from the unnecessary sharing of their immigration statuses.

Ord. 33021, passed in December 2020, banned four technologies that infringe upon our civil liberties and have built-in racial bias. The ordinance also secured common sense data protections for the 21st century.

‍