Dive Brief:
- The city of Stockton, California, plans to use vehicle-mounted cameras and artificial intelligence software to help its understaffed police department detect and report code violations like overgrown lawns, improper parking, peeling paint, boarded windows and graffiti.
- Stockton’s city council unanimously voted last week to enter into a $237,600-per-year contract with City Detect, after running a five-day pilot program using the company’s technology earlier this year. The contract will run for a year with optional second and third years.
- The city hopes the technology will allow code enforcement officers to spend more time proactively finding violations and educating the community rather than primarily reacting to complaints, according to the legislation text.
Dive Insight:
Booming interest in AI has left cities grappling with how to use it to make local government more efficient while minimizing negative unintended consequences.
“AI is going to work its way into your city at some point,” whether it’s through a vendor or an intern, said Stephen Caines, chief innovation officer for the city of San Jose, California, at last month’s Smart City Expo USA. He advised cities to figure out the rules of the road now.
Stockton will be the first California city to use City Detect’s software, officials told CBS News. The company uses vehicle-mounted cameras to analyze scenarios throughout the city, with its machine learning system analyzing the built environment “exponentially faster than traditional reporting methods,” according to the city’s legislation text.
Locations are given a relative blight score, which reflects their blight or deterioration compared with other areas, the document says. That score allows code enforcement officers to prioritize resources and interventions.
The city says its five-day pilot with the technology in January identified 4,000 code violations at over 2,000 locations.
Some other cities are using AI technology similarly. Memphis, Tennessee, for example, is using vehicle-mounted cameras to spot potholes. Columbia, South Carolina, is also testing City Detect’s technology with cameras mounted on garbage trucks. However, some residents have expressed privacy concerns, local newspaper The State reports.
