All one has to do is refer to any point in the past when Mayor Cantrell's administration acted to expand the intrusive police surveillance apparatus deployed against New Orleans residents during her term in office.
At the request of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the New Orleans City Council introduced an ordinance on Thursday to severely roll back local restrictions on law enforcement surveillance that were put in place only 14 months ago.
The proposed ordinance, if passed, would largely reverse the council’s blanket bans on the use facial recognition and characteristic tracking software, which is similar to facial recognition but for identifying race, gender, outfits, vehicles, walking gait and other attributes. One provision also appears to walk back the city’s ban on predictive policing and cell-site simulators — which intercept and spy on cell phone calls — to locate people suspected of certain serious crimes.
That provision could, for the first time, give the city explicit permission to use a whole host of surveillance technology in certain circumstances, including voice recognition, x-ray vans, “through the wall radar,” social media monitoring software, “tools used to gain unauthorized access to a computer,” and more.
And then follow that up with her reaction to having those kinds of tools turned back on her.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell filed for a temporary protective order Friday against a woman she says has stalked her for two years by taking photos and videos of her, according to Orleans Parish Civil District Court records.
Cantrell accuses the woman, Anne Breaud, of "aggressively" taking photos and videos of her on multiple occasions, including on April 7 as she dined on a restaurant balcony.
Breaud's actions over the last two years, she wrote, "have placed me and my family in greater risk of being harmed, jeopardizing my safety especially at places I frequent."
Breaud declined to comment Friday night, and the mayor's office could not be immediately reached.
Okay maybe it's not that easy. It is stupid but some things need clarification. The photographs she's referring to in the second story connect to a tabloid saga regarding the mayor's personal life that I don't have any interest in discussing. The local TV stations have enjoyed it very much because it is salacious in nature which gets a lot of attention while also having zero relevant news or political content which means they don't have to think too hard about anything while presenting it.
If the reporters did want to talk about this with any sort of seriousness, these stories would focus less on the sensationalist aspects and more on the implications of who gets to point cameras at who and to what purpose. Because as it stands currently, the cops and the mayors have so many cameras poking into our daily lives that there's scarcely a step one takes without feeling like some sort of suspect. And yet the moment we might ask the slightest question about the work our public officials are doing, or the moment we point a camera at the police, well now there's the line that can't be crossed.
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