Since April, cameras on Dallas trash trucks have been photographing properties from the street. Software from the vendor City Detect flags possible code violations: tall grass, debris, vehicles parked on lawns, peeling paint. The contract runs three years and is worth about $2.5 million.
NBC 5 Investigates, working from city records, reported in September that the system had scored about 21,000 properties, with the largest numbers in southern Dallas. City officials said people review the images, and that the scores are used only internally to decide which properties to look at first. The city had sent 1,800 courtesy notices asking owners to make repairs voluntarily, against an original goal of about 5,200 a year.
The Dallas Morning News reported that in four months, more than 20,000 flags led to 57 citations at 34 properties, and that the city had not done a full evaluation or a return-on-investment analysis.
Council member Chad West proposed a budget amendment to stop funding the contract. He tabled it after the city manager agreed to hold a hearing on the program in December. City Detect’s chief executive said the system blurs faces and license plates, isn’t linked to a database, and doesn’t work with law enforcement, and that the company doesn’t control how the city uses the data.
Human review kept flags from turning into fines. No one has yet measured whether the program is worth the money.
The funnel is the evaluation
A detection system produces a funnel: flags, flags reviewed, flags confirmed, notices, citations. Each step has a cost. Dallas can count the top and the bottom. The council will need the steps in between in December, along with where the flags land and why.
The concentration in southern Dallas is the question West raised: whether the program falls hardest on residents least able to pay for repairs. That’s a question about who gets flagged, not only about accuracy, and it needs its own numbers.
Before you sign an AI detection contract
- Write down what you’ll count: flags, flags reviewed, flags confirmed, actions taken, and cost per confirmed action.
- Have the vendor report those numbers monthly, by neighborhood.
- Decide what any score is for, who can see it, and whether it can follow a property.
- Tell residents what the cameras capture, what’s blurred, and how long images are kept.
- Set the renewal criteria before the pilot starts, not at the renewal.
Human review is the minimum, not the evaluation.
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