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

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 414 points – Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments
theguardian.com

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.

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So instead of spending X dollars to ensure people have homes, we spend X++ dollars to evict them from their spaces?

Sure, it’s like how NYC spent $150 million to bust people evading $105,000 in subway fees. Absolutely anything to avoid legitimately helping people.

The suffering is the point. They want the threat of homelessness to keep the masses in line.

That is a stupid issue with Mayor Adams, but NYC legitimately spends millions on housing the homeless. The city has to get you shelter. It's the law.

NYC has less than 5% unsheltered in contrast to San Francisco which has 30% unsheltered homeless per night. the driving force of this is the freezing winter in New York, which presents a hazard habitating outside. New York has to choose between making sure everyone gets a warm place, or they get to pick up the dead bodies.

California has a particularly high per-capita homeless population despite efforts toward housing. A large factor is NIMBY homeownership in which HOAs are determined to preserve property values and are a strong lobbying force.

None of that makes any sense. California and NYC have similar property values. If anything, NYC price per square footage is higher on average. There are basically no houses on Manhattan, so almost all places to live have a condo board or co-op board. It's similar to an HOA.

California always had nice weather. Homeless people only existed in large numbers after Governor Reagan emptied the mental institutions and provided few resources for the residents. They literally took away their homes. Before that, NYC had more homeless people.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/03/hard-truths-about-deinstitutionalization-then-and-now/

California could house almost all of its homeless people if they spent the money. It's not even that expensive compared to the alternative.

Just to clarify, when comparing New York City to San Francisco, I'm talking about the percentage of the city's homeless that aren't covered by available shelters, whether state-sponsored, churches or non-profit. I wasn't talking about whether New York City has more homeless than San Francisco (which I do not know) but that the shelters in New York cover most of the homeless, while that is not true in San Francisco.

The second paragraph is about California as a whole state. And yes, we could solve our homeless problem, but landowners actively lobby against it, and our state government is about as corrupt as any of the others.

Downvoted for stating an easily verifiable fact lol

Yes, facts are one thing. But what about what I believe is true? Isn't that more important?

What I believe is important but what I feel is really what matters.

How long has this been a law? The last time I went to NY I saw plenty of people sleeping in Penn Station.

Since 1981:

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2021/10/how-nycs-right-shelter-mandate-works/185933/

And why would you think people wouldn't be able to sleep in a train station? It's just like an airport.

At least one person I saw was in the stairwells on the way from a waiting area down to a train platform. I don't think passengers would want to sleep in the corridor between the gate and the plane at an airport, but you're right, perhaps it is only the locked door that is holding them back.

Now I am kinda curious why they were staying there if they were supposed to be guaranteed shelter. I wouldn't be surprised if the state failed to house them despite the law and that was the warmest place they could find or if the offered accommodations were unfit or dangerous.

I wouldn't be surprised

You are just guessing. Look into it more. They are put up in places that are pretty decent for homeless shelters. They're usually cheap hotels, so you get your own room but no kitchen. It's not somewhere you want to live, but it's 100x better than a train station.

Most homeless people are fine in them, but they have security watching the door so you can't have a party, you can't have pets, and you can't have drugs. Maybe you can't smoke. Some people don't want to live under those conditions. Other people have mental illness and don't want to be in any shelter.

How else would the mega rich be able to buy up the property and rent out the spaces for normal people to finance?

It's literally cheaper to provide the unhoused with healthcare. Not just for them, but for housed people and all taxpayers. But we (as a society) don't. At this point I feel it's literally about cruelty, and punishing them for their "life choices". And you think we'll just give them homes!?

Next time you ask yourself that question, remember that these cunts are spending your tax dollars to hurt those who have nothing left to lose. Vote them out

And considering that veterans are over represented in the homeless population, they actively hurt those who have served the country instead of helping them. Shameful!

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.

Sounds about right for American-christianity.

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

And help them right ? RIGHT ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI policing has begun.

They’ve already been using it to give probably cause and as evidence that all black people are the same and therefore guilty. I’m referring to facial recognition

Every year California is becoming more like Night City. Cyperpunk is supposed to be a dystopia, not an aspiration.

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.

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.

Is it done to give them home quicker? Is it?

*sigh*

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

Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful

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

From the screen grabs, Since when is a legally street parked RV a homeless encampment? Looks like picking low hanging fruit for campaign talking points.

This sounds like a real opportunity for false positives as opposed to, I dunno, engaging with the community?

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holy Mackerel! Could this be any more of an extremely boring dumb and awful cyberpunk dystopia? Good God!

I'm going to choose to believe that the goal is to know how to more efficiently deliver aid to those that need it

disgraceful. If I ever meet somebody involved in this....

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 :-(

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!

Hate my state.

Vote better.

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?

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.

By all means, find a better one.

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you cope with the noxium of urine created amonia, the feces, the needles, the petty crime, and getting hassled and called a "fa**ot" for not having a $1 bill in San Jose, Oakland, SF, or LA but I cannot. All the well wishes are nice, and I would love love if the homeless could be put into unused office space or whatever pipedream is trendy at the time (and there have been a lot of pipedreams in my shortish life). But I want them gone, I want the worse-than-a-favela shantytowns, and I want the smell gone. I don't really give a shit how it's done so long as it isn't cruel or illegal.

So sick to death of all the magical thinking from other liberals in this state. We have the run the of the place and homeless is worse by 5 fold. And the Republicans are just practically begging for mass execution and deportation, as is their way.

I don't care anymore. Just go away.

You just want them gone, how uhh, how are you going to do that?

Duh, by gassing them or by firing squad!

How the fuck should I know? I just said idgaf how it's done, I just do.

Why can't I want homeless shit and piss and devastation out of my city while also have compassion for them as humans and help them? You people are so binary! You can do both.

Because the "fuck it I just want them gone" attitude is what's led to every high level human rights crime and mass murder we learn about in school.

If your problem is the smell, then let's put in latrines. Or, and I know this is a truly radical thought to American Capitalism, we can give them a place to live properly. Instead of forcing them to live like animals because the system refused to pay them enough to exist inside it properly.

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

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

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

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.

that is a disgusting take

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.