Old tires, household trash and construction debris have repeatedly piled up around the Michoud exit of Interstate 10 in New Orleans East. Crews clean the area, only to find more waste dumped later. It is the kind of problem that can make a neighborhood feel forgotten, and it costs real money to address.
Then cameras entered the picture. Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development installed Flock cameras at the Michoud interchange in June 2025. By August 2026, the New Orleans Police Department was reporting 27 illegal dumping cases connected to camera evidence, including nine suspects who had been arrested. That gives this story an unusual twist: license plate camera technology was helping investigate a problem involving trash rather than stolen cars.
But the case numbers also show why a camera image is a lead, not an automatic conviction. Some photographs were not clear enough to support charges. And important questions remain about who controls the images, how long they are kept and whether they can be used for other investigations.
Why was the state watching this particular exit?
The Michoud interchange had been an illegal dumping trouble spot for years. In November 2024 reporting by WDSU, state transportation officials described repeated cleanup efforts as residents complained about tires and other waste along the exit. DOTD had already experimented with cameras and had been handing footage to police.
The scale of the cleanup is startling. In an August 18, 2026 report by FOX 8, DOTD representative Scott Boyle said crews had collected more than 60,000 discarded tires in the area over four years. He put maintenance and overtime expenses at roughly $350,000. Those are cleanup costs, not the price of the Flock cameras.
There is a practical public safety issue here as well. Debris around a road can obstruct maintenance work and create hazards. Police cannot stand guard at every interchange around the clock, so a photograph of a vehicle at the right time may help investigators follow a lead after a dumping complaint.
What did police actually find?
The reported numbers cover the period beginning June 27, 2025, through the August 18, 2026 news report. New Orleans police said they opened 27 cases based on the camera findings. Four lacked enough photographic information to pursue charges. Of the other 23, police described 16 as cleared by an arrest or warrant and seven as still under investigation. Police reported nine suspects arrested.
Those figures need to be read carefully. Sixteen cleared cases do not mean 16 convictions or even 16 arrests. An arrest warrant and a completed criminal case are different things. The department also reported five incidents during 2026 up to that August snapshot, so these are not newly discovered November cases.
Boyle told FOX 8 that the interchange had improved but that people were still dumping waste there. The numbers document investigative activity and some arrests. They do not, by themselves, establish how much of any decline in dumping was caused by the cameras rather than cleanup work, enforcement or other changes.
Who owns the cameras, and who uses the pictures?
Here is a detail worth noticing: the state transportation department installed the Michoud equipment. New Orleans police then used the resulting evidence in investigations. That does not make the cameras identical to every other system operated by city police, nearby departments or private organizations.
The City of New Orleans describes its own Real-Time Crime Center as a separate public safety operation that uses hundreds of cameras and includes license plate readers among its technologies. The city says ordinary unarchived video at that center is deleted after 30 days, with exceptions for footage preserved for legitimate public safety purposes.
But we should not assume the city’s 30-day video policy automatically controls the state transportation department’s Flock records. The materials reviewed for this article do not establish the Michoud camera contract’s specific retention period, sharing permissions or search audit procedures. Those would have to be checked against the agreement and the agency’s actual settings.
Does the rest of the New Orleans area use the same system?
Not necessarily. In neighboring Kenner, Police Chief Keith Conley described a network of 78 Flock cameras in August 12 reporting by FOX 8. He credited the technology with helping investigators find people and vehicles linked to crimes. That was his department’s assessment of Kenner’s network, not a count of cameras owned by New Orleans city government.
Tulane University also uses Flock plate readers around its campus, according to an August 18 Axios overview of the New Orleans region. A university police program, a state highway installation and city public safety equipment can have different operators, rules and reasons for collecting information even when drivers encounter them on the same trip.
And a camera that recognizes a license plate is not the same thing as a camera that identifies a person’s face. The New Orleans area has faced separate controversy about facial recognition. Those programs deserve scrutiny in their own right, but they should not be mixed into a claim about what the Michoud plate cameras do.
What questions would help residents judge the program?
The obvious benefit is that investigators can use images to pursue a stubborn local problem without having an officer stationed at the exit all day. The photographs also give the public a more concrete way to understand why cameras were installed in the first place.
But residents have reasonable questions too. Do the cameras record every passing vehicle or only images associated with suspected dumping? How long can ordinary plate sightings be searched? Can agencies outside Louisiana access them? Who approves a search for an unrelated investigation, and who reviews the access logs?
There is another question: how many dumping cases resulted in convictions or actual cleanup reimbursement? Arrest counts alone cannot answer that. A useful public report would show results, mistakes, costs and the safeguards applied to the data.
For other documented examples of what license plate readers can help police accomplish, see our guide to cases involving missing people and recovered vehicles. New Orleans shows why the same accountability questions also matter when cameras are used for a neighborhood quality of life problem.
Sources
FOX 8, August 18, 2026: Michoud Flock installations, NOPD cases and arrests, DOTD cleanup figures; WDSU, November 26, 2024: earlier dumping conditions and transportation department camera efforts; FOX 8, July 11, 2025: long-running illegal dumping cleanup; City of New Orleans: Real-Time Crime Center systems and city video retention policy; FOX 8, August 12, 2026: Kenner’s separate plate reader network; Axios New Orleans, August 18, 2026: regional camera operators including Tulane.