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Bars, breweries, music venues, restaurants, corner stores and any of the hundreds of businesses selling booze in New Orleans would be required to install street-facing cameras outside their doors and submit that footage to the city?s new crime camera nerve center, shared with the New Orleans Police Department and state and federal law enforcement, under the current language of a proposed ordinance that could face the New Orleans City Council as early as Dec. 14.

That proposed requirement falls under a section titled ?Participation in Community Security Systems? inside a 22-page ordinance that aims to reconfigure how the city handles permits and violations for businesses selling alcohol.

The requirement ? introduced by At-Large Councilwoman Stacy Head at the request of Mayor Mitch Landrieu?s administration ? would supplement the more than 200 city-owned crime cameras, piped into a recently opened Real Time Crime Monitoring Center on the edge of the French Quarter. Under Head?s ordinance, the city?s cloud-based platform would archive the footage for no less than two weeks.

That one paragraph in a measure ostensibly tied to streamlining permitting for alcohol vendors has sounded an alarm for police watchdogs, community groups, bars and restaurants ? and the ACLU of Louisiana, which announced Dec. 13 that it has ?condemned? the measure, which ?would threaten privacy rights without effectively reducing crime.?
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