Tami Ruhl stands outside her car on Sand Pebble Drive on Wednesday, April 3, 2024 in San Jose, California. The city of San Jose has launched a pilot program that uses AI to identify occupied RVs and homeless camps. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Cities across the country are beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence to map potholes, reduce traffic, and fight wildfires. In San Jose, officials are now leveraging rapidly evolving technology with another goal in mind: detecting homeless encampments.
Three times since December, a city-owned white Toyota sedan equipped with six small cameras has patrolled South San Jose, collecting footage of parked cars and RVs. The images were then fed into various AI systems developed by four private companies to determine whether there was a person living inside the vehicle.
The open-ended pilot program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, could soon aim to identify tent encampments and could one day expand to a permanent fleet of vehicles crisscrossing the city.
Homeless advocates worry the effort could lead to more encampment sweeps and seizures of residential RVs, but city officials say the effort will provide needed services for homeless people. He said he is optimistic that the project will help provide shelter and housing. Officials stressed that the program is not designed to collect license plate or human facial identification footage.
“We're not interested in the personal information of people who live outdoors,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. “But we need to know where all the residential vehicles in the city are in order to manage them.”
The plans, first revealed by the Guardian, come as Mr Mahan pushes for “an end to the era of encampments” amid growing residents' frustration with street homelessness.
At the mayor's request, the City Council agreed earlier this year to develop policies that include banning RVs near schools, restricting large vehicle parking citywide and creating new towing zones. The city estimates there are more than 800 residential RVs.
At the same time, city officials are developing plans to move about 1,000 homeless people from local waterways to shelters. San Jose has an estimated 6,300 homeless residents, about 70% of whom live outside or in their cars. The rest remain in shelters.
In addition to responding to encampments, San Jose's pilot program aims to help identify trash, graffiti, potholes and parking violations. Other cities are already using AI for this purpose, but San Jose is the first to use technology to detect occupied RVs and tents, according to AI experts and homeless advocacy groups across the country. It seems like it's the first time.
Tami Ruhl moved into an RV parked in a residential area near Interstate 87 and the Capitol Expressway after a fire destroyed the apartment she shared with her husband in San Jose's West San Carlos neighborhood last year. . Rhule, 56, said her biggest concern about the show was that people saw footage of plastic boxes filled with clothes, shoes, small potted plants and other belongings that the couple had piled up outside their car. She said that she was staring at him.
“But to help someone understand what it's like to live in a camper,” she says. “I don't care about that.”
Officials in other parts of the Bay Area, San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont and Mountain View, said they have no plans to use AI to track encampments.
Still, experts said it's not hard to imagine the city following in San Jose's footsteps. Last month, Mahan hosted a virtual forum on using AI to improve public services, inviting White House and local government officials from around the country.
Vishnu Pendiyala, an AI professor and researcher at San Jose State University, said the technology has “huge potential” to detect homeless encampments. But he also cited privacy concerns surrounding pilot programs and other nascent AI efforts.
“We're already seeing a lot of things being hacked and a lot of things being exploited,” Pendiala said. He pointed to reports that Apple contractors were allegedly listening to recordings of iPhone users asking questions to Siri, an AI-powered program.
City officials and companies working on the pilot say their top priority is protecting people's privacy, including by explicitly instructing AI systems to ignore faces and license plate numbers. Ta.
“AI is going to be the dominant technology, whether we like it or not,” said Khaled Tawfik, San Jose's chief information officer. “We want to be a leader in identifying risks and finding ways to mitigate them.”
Tawfik said the department is not sharing any information with other local agencies or police departments during the pilot, and further data and footage distributed will obscure specific details.
Tawfik said the city of San Jose started the program, currently limited to South San Jose City Council District 10, in response to the thousands of 311 calls it receives each year reporting vehicles that appear abandoned. He said the city aims to proactively identify which vehicles are occupied so officials know where to send homeless assistance teams.
So far, pilots are identifying occupied RVs with about 70% accuracy. Occupied vehicles are correctly recognized only 10-15% of the time.
Masaf Dawood, vice president of San Mateo-based Xloop Digital, one of the companies participating in the pilot, expects those numbers to improve as the AI analyzes thousands more images. ing. According to him, this is the first time the city has asked the company to identify residential vehicles. Xloop Digital's software looks for markers such as trash on the road, rows of parked RVs, unexpected objects like coffee makers on the car's dashboard.
Despite the technology's potential, Dawood still expects a margin of error. “I don't think you can say, 'Oh, I'm going to be 100 percent,' and I don't think you should say that,” he said.
Other companies participating in the pilot are Sensen.AI, CityRover and Mountain View-based Blue Dome Technologies.
Todd Langton, executive director of homeless advocacy group Agape Silicon Valley, worries the program could “turbocharge” the city's push to remove recreational vehicles from its streets. Langton said towing the cars of homeless people not only deprives them of shelter, but also often forces them to give up personal belongings, important documents and medicine, which can exacerbate mental health and drug issues. He said that there is a possibility that
Meanwhile, many residents want the city to take a tougher stance against vehicle and tent encampments. Students at KIPP San Jose University, an East San Jose high school, are pressuring city officials to ban RVs near schools, saying homeless people are breaking into the school building and leaving needles on school lunch tables.
San Jose authorities say they want homeless people to have a safe place to stay as they crack down. They point to recent efforts to build hundreds of small family shelters and open secure overnight parking lots with support services.
Still, those solutions aren't coming fast enough, Langton said. The city still doesn't have enough beds for all those living on the streets, and there is a severe shortage of affordable housing, so most people who move through local shelters are not offered permanent homes. cannot be found.
“This is just a drop in the bucket of things to do,” Langton said.
Staff writer Kate Talerico contributed to this report.