The city of Dallas is making changes to its AI camera code enforcement program in the wake of an NBC 5 investigation that raised questions about privacy, how enforcement might impact the poorest residents and why some homeowners found the city’s violation notices frightening. <\/p>\n
At a Quality of Life briefing on Monday, officials acknowledged the concerns and outlined steps to address them.<\/p>\n
City Detect, the city contractor that runs the AI cameras, said it’s now blurring entire bodies, not just faces, in the camera images as a result of questions NBC 5 Investigates raised.<\/p>\n
Officials also pledged to soften the language in violation notices, and they said they’re no longer using the term “blight score” to describe how the system evaluates homes, a term NBC 5 Investigates flagged at the start of its investigation.<\/p>\n
Council members raise questions about privacy<\/p>\n
Those AI cameras on top of Dallas trash trucks roam city streets, photographing homes in search of code violations.<\/p>\n
But some council members now want more eyes on the cameras and the information they collect.<\/p>\n
“What’s the check and balance on this program?” councilmember Chad West asked during the briefing.<\/p>\n
Some councilmembers raised concerns about the images themselves.<\/p>\n
“I want to make sure that information is being blurred,” said councilmember Bill Roth.<\/p>\n
As NBC 5 Investigates first reported, photos obtained from the camera system through an open records request showed that even though faces were blurred, people’s body and clothing descriptions were still visible.<\/p>\n
And the images are stamped with the date, time and location.<\/p>\n
After NBC 5’s reporting, the City Detect says it’s made changes.<\/p>\n
“We went back to our engineering team, and we actually enhanced the blurring. So now it’s the entire body. You can’t see what color somebody is. You can see what clothing they are,” said City Detect CEO, Gavin Baum-Blake.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe city of Dallas is making changes to its AI camera code enforcement program in the wake of an NBC 5 investigation that raised questions. The changes will address privacy protections, violation notices and “blight score” terminology used to evaluate properties as council members called for greater oversight.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
City working to soften violation notices<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the city said it’s working to soften the so-called “courtesy notices” it’s sent to more than 3,000 homeowners, notifying them of code violations cameras spotted and humans confirmed.<\/p>\n