Drivers cruising past New Orleans schools this year are finding out the hard way that a dead camera does not mean a free pass. NOPD officers can now cite a driver for going just 1 mile per hour over the 20 mph school-zone limit, and the department says it is doing exactly that, even though the city's automated speed cameras have remained shut off for over a year.
The enforcement push comes as New Orleans remains locked in a legal battle over a 2024 state law requiring municipalities to split school-zone camera fine revenue with local school districts before those cameras can legally operate again. As reported by NOLA.com, the city has challenged that law in a constitutional lawsuit filed in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge, and that case is still ongoing. In the meantime, NOPD traffic officers trained on August 4th to operate handheld radar and lidar speed-tracking devices, and each police district has now received its own speed guns.
117 Tickets in a Single West Bank Sweep
The scale of the manual enforcement effort was on display during a recent operation in a West Bank school zone, where NOPD issued 117 citations over a two-hour period, according to the same NOLA.com report. Officers separately pulled over speeders near Alice Harte Charter School in the Old Aurora neighborhood of Algiers, stopping 38 vehicles in that zone alone. NOPD officers are writing more tickets this year than last year, and the traffic unit has added three officers over the past two months, per the report.
Lt. Avery Theard, assistant commander of the NOPD Traffic Division, told the paper that speeding near schools puts children in real danger, whether they are waiting for a bus or walking to campus, and that higher speeds magnify the severity of any collision. The department says it decides where to deploy officers based on community complaints, officer observations, and data pointing to known speeding hot spots, and traffic officers will keep focusing enforcement on those locations. NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick has made the ticketing push part of a larger initiative prioritizing traffic safety citywide, the outlet reports.
Why the Cameras Are Still Dark
The cameras did not go quiet by accident. Louisiana lawmakers passed Act 103 in 2024, which under Orleans Parish School Board guidance requires cities to sign a Cooperative Endeavor Agreement sharing 40% of net camera ticket revenue with school governing authorities before automated devices can run in school zones. New Orleans and the school board eventually struck a deal on August 21, 2025, agreeing to a 60/40 revenue split and distributing school funds on a per-pupil basis using February enrollment counts that cover district-run and charter campuses alike.
But a second law, Act 107, complicated things further by banning automated speed cameras statewide outside strictly compliant school zones and by turning non-compliant camera ticketing into a potential malfeasance-in-office charge for public officials. That provision reportedly prompted Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill to threaten criminal investigations against New Orleans officials, according to discussion cited on r/NewOrleans, before the city responded with its constitutional challenge on September 4, 2025.
Millions in Lost Revenue, Millions More in Refund Trouble
The financial fallout has been significant. NOLA.com reports New Orleans attributes an $8 million decline in camera collections to the shutdown during repairs to flashing beacons and signs, a sharp drop from the $7.3 million school-zone cameras collected between April 2024 and April 2025 alone. City spokesperson Jonah Gilmore has said the cameras collected $15.4 million in 2023, before the more recent downturn. In the ten weeks after cameras were ordered off in April 2025, they still managed to collect $1.8 million, money the city says it is now holding in escrow.
Those figures land alongside a rockier finding from the city's own watchdog. A January 8th WWL-TV report on a New Orleans Office of Inspector General review found NOPD officers reviewed 68% of automated camera citations in 2024 in under 10 seconds, and 23% of citations in under three seconds, raising questions about how carefully those tickets were checked before being mailed out. The same report found the city has accumulated more than $770,000 in unrefunded overpayments to motorists because of accounting flaws and the absence of a permanent refund system, a problem that has lingered despite an earlier refund effort following a 2020 audit.
Cameras or Not, Traffic Deaths Are Falling
Despite the camera standoff, New Orleans has recorded encouraging numbers on the ground. The city recorded 21 traffic fatalities as of July 9th, marking a 38% decline from 2024's 64 deaths and a 29% decline from 2025's 56 deaths, according to NOLA.com. At that pace, the city is projected to record about 40 traffic deaths by the end of 2026.
City officials have framed the manual ticketing campaign as proof that enforcement does not require a functioning camera network, even as the legal fight over who profits from those cameras drags on. For now, drivers rolling through New Orleans school zones are just as likely to see an officer with a radar gun as a camera flash, and NOPD says that message is intentional: slow down, because someone is watching either way.
