There is no consolidated “department of surveillance” in New Orleans, no single venue where residents like Green can go to learn more. “It's sort of a Frankestein's monster,” said Bruce Hamilton, former senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Louisiana, who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. New Orleans’ surveillance apparatus isn’t so much a comprehensive system as it is a sprawling, decentralized and constantly changing patchwork of tools maintained by various city departments, semi-independent agencies, private nonprofits and federal and state law enforcement. The cameras began popping up across town in late 2017 as part of a $40 million public safety plan that also included a fleet of license plate readers and a state-of-the-art surveillance hub called the Real Time Crime Center. Since then, local advocates like Green have been working to track and expose the city’s surveillance capabilities. “We noticed a camera above our garden space and wanted to begin investigating.” “There was no real community engagement around these cameras, it just happened,” said Green, a member of the local anti-surveillance coalition Eye on Surveillance. That’s what Dee Dee Green remembers thinking the first time she saw one of New Orleans’ police surveillance cameras in 2018, flashing red and blue lights over a community garden she manages in the city’s Hollygrove neighborhood. Project by Michael Isaac Stein, Caroline Sinders and Winnie Yoe October 21, 2021
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