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.
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.