Surveillance And Culture: Life in the Spotlight Shouldn’t Mean Life Under a Microscope
The cultural community and cultural practices are often on the forefront of conversations around public space, by definition, because of where they perform their craft. Debates over sound levels of street performers, prohibited uses under zoning law, disputes between neighboring residents and music venues—these are recurring issues that MaCCNO works to mitigate as we help to develop long-term solutions. While our initial focus was largely limited to ordinances and proposals that primarily impacted cultural activity specifically (changes to the noise ordinance, for example), over the years we have expanded our scope to address other underlying challenges, such as the lack of affordable housing, healthy food access, and disaster relief. Somewhat unexpectedly, one of these larger issues is government surveillance.
Our anti-surveillance work began in 2017 in response to a provision in then Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s “Citywide Public Safety Plan” that, if adopted, would have mandated all Alcoholic Beverage Outlets (ABOs) in New Orleans—which includes all bars, virtually every music venue, and most restaurants—install exterior surveillance cameras linked to the City’s Real-Time Crime Center to be monitored by the NOPD 24 hours a day. By extension, this meant that musicians, service industry workers, and business owners would have been subject to daily, real-time government surveillance for simply trying to make a living. To fight this, we launched our “Culture Not Cameras” campaign, which brought together musicians, traditional culture bearers, business owners and patrons, and social justice and immigrant rights organizations in a joint advocacy effort which was ultimately successful in defeating government-mandated surveillance of ABOs, including many important cultural spaces.
Despite this victory, government surveillance has expanded and adopted new tactics, with potential impacts on anyone in the community being surveilled. In fact, the year after our victory over real-time surveillance of ABOs, reporting from The Verge revealed that, since 2012, the NOPD had secretly been collaborating with Palantir—a data mining and surveillance firm founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel—to carry out and refine a “predictive policing” program, which used patterns in data to flag individuals without their knowledge as potential perpetrators or victims of violence. Surveillance cameras, many of which are equipped with powerful facial recognition technology, have also become much more ubiquitous over the past decade, largely due to the efforts of Project NOLA, a nonprofit that manages an ever-growing private surveillance network which now includes some of the same bars and music venues that would have been forced to install similar cameras had the Landrieu Public Safety Plan been implemented—only this time, they chose to install the cameras voluntarily.
One of our primary concerns is the potential chilling effect constant surveillance can have on cultural activity that takes place in public space, particularly when legal structures are confusing, contradictory, or not well defined—which is often the case for street performers, for example. Indeed, in 2022, handheld video from a street musician performing on Royal Street captured Matthew Pincus, director of the French Quarter Management District-funded Upper Quarter Patrol, removing a protective barricade closing the street to traffic and telling the performer that “if there is anyone seen putting it back up on the crime cameras, [the NOPD] will cite”—a clear threat that the NOPD would use real time surveillance to monitor the activities of street musicians in the French Quarter to look for alleged violations. In a subsequent meeting, the NOPD denied that this was their policy, implying that Pincus was independently using surveillance as a threat. In 2024, Facebook posts from Project NOLA also confirmed that NOPD had asked the nonprofit to use their extensive private camera network to assist in monitoring street vendors on Bourbon Street.
Now, a recent $740,000 proposal by NOPD to use drones as “first responders” in the French Quarter have brought many of the same issues back up, recentering this debate in the public eye. While the NOPD does have an existing drone program, this program may constitute an expansion of their use, and comments by Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Michael Harrison that these drones could be sent for “nuisance issues” are of particular concern—and also seem to be in violation of the department’s existing drone policy. There is also a lack of public transparency surrounding the proposal, as the funding request is being made through the French Quarter Management District, an unelected state entity that prevents the public from recording their meetings, a potential violation of Louisiana public meetings law. Residents have a right to know the full details of this program, and should be able to express their opinion about it in a public forum, whether they be for or against the expansion of drones in the French Quarter. (If you would like to know about this proposed new drone program, give Eye On Surveillance a follow on social media, @eos_nola or eyeonsurveillance.org for more info.)
New Orleans has a distinct cultural landscape, where public space is a sacred incubator for the cultural practices we are known for worldwide. Governmental surveillance changes that public space by definition, and has the potential to cause anxiety or fear to pervade what was a joyful, expressive space. Simultaneously, in an environment where so many residents are struggling with the costs of housing, health care, transportation, and access to healthy food, the act of spending nearly a million dollars on additional surveillance technology when there are so many other pressing needs is at best misguided, at worst a deep insult. As basic needs continue to grow, that money could do so much good elsewhere.
Life as a performer comes with certain expectations, but having to deal with constant government surveillance shouldn’t be one of them.
This space is provided to MaCCNO as a community service and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or editorial policies of ANTIGRAVITY.
