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Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments

Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States.

Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces.

There’s no set end date for the pilot phase of the project, Tawfik said in an interview, and as the models improve he believes the target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs, parking violations and overgrown trees.

City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates.

The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.

In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems.

The original article contains 1,487 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

akrz ,

good bot

furzegulo ,

this brave new future which we live in fucking sucks

insaneinthemembrane ,

Maybe it's to help them.

Don't tell me, I like the illusion.

ohwhatfollyisman ,

quite ironically in this context, san jose is named after st. joseph -- he of the legal dad of jesus fame -- who was once famously told there was no room at the inn and had to make do in a stable.

RobotToaster ,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

Sounds about right for American-christianity.

jkrtn ,

Only if you're charging a luxury room price for the stable.

pennomi ,

the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%

Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

It doesn’t have to be accurate to be useful

0x0 ,

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

Basically a dowsing rod, totally incapable of detecting bombs, drugs, etc. But possibly still useful as a probable cause generator.

blackluster117 ,
@blackluster117@possumpat.io avatar

That was probably one of the more depressing Wiki articles I've read in a minute.

perviouslyiner ,

I wonder if it could spot Steve

HonoraryMancunian ,

I'm so grateful he's Canadian

horsey ,

That surely won’t stop governments from throwing millions at it or private companies from taking the money.

empireOfLove2 ,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

it'd be a shame if a .22 round found it's way through the casing of that camera. A real damn shame for sure.

Aux ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

    •
    vaultdweller013 ,
    @vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Hey look its the bay area. Can it burn down again please. Sincerely some redneck from the IE

    horsey ,

    Right, why can’t it be a wonderful place to live like Riverside or San Bernardino?

    vaultdweller013 ,
    @vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Yeah we're shitholes but we are damned well aware of it. Only the rich fuckers think otherwise.

    gravitas_deficiency ,

    This might actually get struck down on constitutionality. How does one confront their accuser in court if the accuser is a trained neural net?

    And that’s without even touching on the fact that ML is stochastic in nature, and should absolutely not be considered accurate enough to be an unsupervised and unmoderated single-point-of-failure decision engine in contexts like legal, medical, or other critical decision-making process. The fact that ML regularly and demonstrably hallucinates (or otherwise yields garbage output) is just not acceptable in a regulatory sense.

    Source: software engineer in biotech; we are specifically disallowed from using ML at any level in our work for the above reasons, as well as potential HIPAA-related data mining issues.

    dependencyinjection ,

    I don’t know much about jurisprudence, but wouldn’t the neural net be a tool of the person that brought the lawsuit.

    Like if you get brought in due to DNA, you don’t have to face the centrifuge that helped extract your DNA from the sample?

    gravitas_deficiency ,

    You’re ignoring the fact that using such a failure-prone system to initiate legal proceedings against a citizen is ABSOLUTELY going to overload an already overloaded system. And that’s not even going into the fact that it puts an unjust burden on those falsely accused, or the fact that it’s targeting a segment of the population that’s a lot more likely to go “fuck it, I don’t care, how could things possibly get worse” (read: serious depression, PTSD, other neurodivergences that often correlate with being unhoused). This is by-design.

    This is an all-around grade-A shit policy. It’s also a policy designed to treat the symptom instead of the cause. It will make the streets around San Jose look a bit nicer, and in doing so it will harm a lot of people.

    ShepherdPie ,

    I think it's a stupid policy but I don't see how any of this is applicable. If the AI identifies an encampment, it's going to be police that come and scare them off. This isn't like a red light camera where you get mailed a ticket because there's no address to send a ticket to and the AI isn't going to be able to identify individuals occupying a tent.

    dependencyinjection ,

    I mean I’m not ignoring those facts. I prefaced by saying I don’t know much about jurisprudence.

    Thanks for providing some insight though.

    gravitas_deficiency ,

    For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to come off stabby or dismissive

    dependencyinjection ,

    No problem.

    Appreciate you clarifying. Have a nice day random person.

    horsey ,

    I don’t think the idea is to bring criminal proceedings against people. Not sure what they do in San Jose but in cities I’ve lived, homeless people are essentially immune to fines or criminal charges because police know they can’t/wont pay anything. So they go force them to move and throw away their belongings if they can’t or don’t take them in time, but do not arrest or ticket these people.

    azl ,

    The service described in the article has nothing to do with courts, regulation, enforcement, or the legal system. It is used by city maintenance to identify elements of public property in need of attention, such as abandoned vehicles and potholes in the asphalt. It is being adapted to identify accumulations of trash and other indicators of illegal camping which are important to maintainers of public spaces.

    DataCrime ,

    What a great new use for Ai 😂 I can drive, identify vehicles that people are living in with 70% accuracy and pick out fresh new tracks on iTunes with 25% accuracy. How many companies did they have working on this so they can later make millions not actually fixing anything :-(

    the_rogue ,
    @the_rogue@sh.itjust.works avatar

    And help them right ? RIGHT ?

    Stopthatgirl7 OP ,
    @Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world avatar

    If only we didn’t live in a dystopia and that was what this was for.

    the_rogue ,
    @the_rogue@sh.itjust.works avatar

    One can only dream i guess.

    Sarmyth ,

    Yes and no. San Jose has many many programs to assist the homeless, but some of them are dying in the creeks with flooding. We also have relatively new initiatives for reporting encampment to outreach groups instead of the police.

    Not everywhere is a safe place for someone to settle. It's one thing to have a person spend the night somewhere, but services like these may help identify encampments that are establishing in areas at risk of flooding etc before they get too entrenched.

    Dudewitbow ,

    San Jose's homeless is a very mixed bag. some wanting to be perpetually homeless, some actual recently loss home and is savable, some on the streets due to drugs (friend had a story where homeless asked for a burger, but refused one from a burger joint nearest by (implied wanted money for drugs)).

    Weeding out whose helpable isnt an easy task, because not all homeless share the same reason on how they got to that lifestyle.

    azl ,

    This is part of the problem with using terms like "homeless" to describe the occupants of an illegal campsite. There are numerous reasons one may choose to camp in a public space.

    • Some are truly struggling to regain their financial footing and either the assistance programs are not helpful or they are unable to utilize them.
    • Some are sick which causes them to be unable to participate functionally in society, and they have "fallen through the cracks" of services designed to support them.
    • Some reject housing in favor of a lifestyle that demands less effort or accountability -- possibly in service of addiction, which ties into #2 above.

    All members of society should have access to shelter (or a safe campsite, if that is our preference) and our basic needs met. As members of society, we shall follow laws which describe, for very good reasons, why we cannot simply erect a camping tent in a city park.

    The problem with ignoring campsites is plummeting hygiene and safety. Waste is generated by day to day life and must be collected or eliminated. As campers accumulate and abandon the implements of a semi-permanent hovel: furniture, bedding, tarps, etc., the surrounding area transforms into a dumping site.

    The technology described in the article already identifies potholes and illegal parking. It does not identify people or their race. Surely it could evolve into something with more potential for abuse, but in its current capacity, it is quite a neutral tool.

    We have collected a lot of data on the "ignore and do nothing" solution -- the outcome is a scientific certainty. Using tools like this to measure progress (for better or worse) seems like something that would help generate support for other solutions, such as extensive expansion of low-cost/no-cost housing services.

    Dudewitbow ,

    its definitely a problem thats hard to tackle, and each location handles it very differently. there have been situations in some cities where having shelters wasnt prefered because people who polled felt like said locations were unsafe, and others felt like restrictions for spots were to restrictive (e. g first come first served)

    fundamentally, i believe its a problem that wont be solved by a person hired to do it because their job disappears the moment it is solved. as long as property is seen as an investment and prices remain high, along with nimby laws that coincide with it, it effectively cant fix itself.

    in context of San Jose itself, there have been many years in which the number of vacant households out number the number of homeless. thats fundamentally a problem of people who owns homes and choosing not to rent them out for various reasons.(some reasonable, others not). it effectively inflates home prices in the city which doesnt need to exist unless the government decides to do something about it, and that would require. stepping on the feet of home owners, so its ultimately a tug a war between them and the government till something gets done.

    General_Effort ,

    "unwanted objects"

    werefreeatlast ,

    They start out identifying the various "races" probably. I'm a brown person and would like to keep reminding everyone that different races do not exist in the sense that it is not a scientific term with any meaning. A term with proper meaning is "species" and there is only one "homosapiens".... it's not just Juantastic who lives under the bridge, it's all of us. We are all a single family. Anyway, would you let your brother or sister or parents or relatives go live under a bridge and hungry? Nah right? What if they were thousands of miles away and didn't have a place to sleep in? Still nah! You would do whatever to try to help! So why are there homeless people in every city and why do we not help Gaza and Ukraine people? Right? We need to do a better job!

    systemglitch ,

    When housing becomes a for profit business, this is the result. It's happening in my city in Canada as well.

    I have a homeless community sprouting up behind our cul de sac and it gets bigger each spring. It likely disappears in the winter, I've no desire to walk through the uncleared snow to find out. And a few blocks away people are camping out on sidewalks everywhere, it's becoming an epidemic, in a city that was once very affordable.

    Fredselfish ,
    @Fredselfish@lemmy.world avatar

    Tulsa Oklahoma is full of homeless encampments and this is supposed to be one of the cheaper states to live in. Yet landlords want to price their places like the bigger cities. It is scary to see what cost to rent in this town compared to the pay being offer for jobs. Its wonder there isn't more homeless.

    MyNamesNotRobert , (edited )

    Being homeless is like the software piracy equivalent of housing. You're not paying but rich people are "losing money" since homeless people aren't paying them $4000+/month therefore it's a crime.

    root ,

    Do you really think the concerns about encampments are all from rent seeking landlords?

    Here in Minneapolis it's the number of murders, gang violence (territory), rape, and human trafficking.

    Second tier issues are overdoses, fires, sanitation (which doesn't sound like much until you see the people with fingers and toes rotting off), and crime rates increasing as they try to make enough money to feed their drug habits.

    It's a very complex issue. Much more complex than "the landlords are upset people aren't paying rent".

    Morefan ,

    These 'homeless' are no better than Gypsies. They reject society and take advantage of the good nature in people. They are scumbags and do not deserve sympathy.

    If they can stand on the same corner every day at the same time they are more than capable of getting a job.

    sfxrlz ,

    that is a disgusting take

    Morefan ,

    Reality isn't here to amuse you. People with nice shoes and cell phones aren't 'homeless'. They prey on the naive.

    coffeebiscuit ,

    Are you talking about billionaires?

    Wereduck ,

    You are completely divorced from the reality on the ground.

    A good chunk of the unhoused (at least where I live, US CA) have jobs, it's just not enough for rent or they can't find a place because of poor credit, which means the places available are even more expensive.
    Rent has increased faster than median income, and way faster than low income.

    Most unhoused are there temporarily. Anything nice they have may be from before they got into their present situation. And what are they supposed to do? Pawn off their cell phone for pennies on the dollar?

    The explosion in number of unhoused people is not just a bunch of people happening to have some sort of moral failure all at once. The simpler explanation is that our economy and society is failing. And what do we expect to see as resources are hoarded by the powerful at exponentially increasing rates? Where do those resources come from?

    Also self report on your attitude toward Roma people.

    Morefan ,

    Gaslight all you want. Homeless people are not 'down-and-out'. There's plenty of help for those people who want it. The rest are scammer scumbags.

    your attitude toward Roma people.

    Again you reject reality - https://www.policemag.com/special-units/article/15349960/gypsies-kings-of-con

    Wereduck ,

    Do you know how much work it is to live unhoused? How uncomfortable and dehumanizing? If you are completely without shelter, how it is after it rains, or the air is choked with smoke during fire season?

    It seems like you have just one explanation for everything here. When there's a problem, it's because of some moral failing that has to be punished. The publication you reference is telling.

    Your attitude toward both Roma and unhoused is an outside look in, entirely through the lens of criminality. There is no understanding there. You are missing the big picture, the why behind all of the things people do.

    If you really want to scam people, you start an LLC and live comfortably off of other people's work, like, you know, rich people do.

    blackn1ght ,

    This comment is so ridiculous it has to be some sort of bait.

    RaoulDook ,

    Yeah it's a bit racist about the Gypsies on top of the rest of the shit-take

    Morefan ,

    Not my fault you have your head up your ass. Open your eyes. Think for yourself.

    Too scary huh? Never mind just go back to sleep, be a good little NPC.

    wolfruff ,

    Hate my state.

    TheControlled ,

    By all means, find a better one.

    qdJzXuisAndVQb2 ,

    Uf, this is not a great response. That citizen should stay and add their valuable voice to calls and demands for improvement.

    TheControlled ,

    Someone who hates California sounds like a useless fucking Californian already--lacking "value."

    qdJzXuisAndVQb2 ,

    Fair point, they should be constructive, I guess.

    DoucheBagMcSwag ,

    Not... Everyone can afford to pick up everything and move or they may have other factors like job and family keeping them there

    wolfruff ,

    Yeah im trying my damnest but this state is meant to keep people poor.

    TheControlled ,

    Real shit? No fucking way bro. Please explain what being poor and trapped feels like to me.

    root ,

    Vote better.

    redfox ,
    @redfox@infosec.pub avatar

    Doesn't the Democratic party have complete majority control of most cities and the state legislature?

    That's a party which usually claims to be about taking care of poor people or 'housing is a human right', but I keep seeing evidence that part of California's issue is residents eliminating any/all zoning that isn't classic single family homes in places where there's tons of good jobs, but super expensive housing.

    It's hard to wade through political party propaganda, but I thought this was well documented.

    I don't live in CA, so I don't really know more than articles publish, but it just seems like they voted for the more American liberal/progressive party and still aren't getting those values?

    root ,

    Yeah, it turns out that politicians in both parties are garbage people pandering to the masses.

    Instead of voting along party lines people need to vote for real people that can act like adults and actually govern. Most of our government officials are now too busy passing meaningless resolutions, performing the same study that's popular in all the other cities, or busy on social media pandering to vocal minorities.

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