“Neighborhood Watched” was a collaboration between Caroline Sinders of Convocation Research + Design and journalist Michael Isaac Stein of the Lens, a criminal justice focused journalism site in New Orleans. “Neighborhood Watched” is a multi-part interactive, data driven investigative journalism article that reveals how surveillance systems and privacy eroding technology and policies are embedded into the ways New Orleans police track and monitor citizens. Tying together explanatory journalism with accessible toolkits, this project provides a list of surveillance systems otherwise obscured by bureaucracy. These systems are contextualized and explained through lenses of safety, cost, and legality.

This project was funded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

On August 3, 2026, our project was featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight’s episode on “Police Surveillance Technology.”

Project team: Michael Isaac Stein, Caroline Sinders (Convocation Research + Design), Winnie Yoe and Annabel Church.