Over the summer, the city of Dallas started using A.I. powered cameras attached to garbage trucks to make code enforcement more efficient.
The cameras scan your yard and issue residents with violations a so-called 'courtesy notice' suggesting repairs or fixes. Homes are also issued a 'blight score' between 1-4, ranging from the least severe to most severe code violations noted by the cameras.
The NBC-5 investigative team broke this story earlier this month. A new report Thursday provided an update on the program's acceleration, and took a closer look a the notices being sent to homeowners, which some residents find confusing and misleading.
The program may also be disproportionately impacting homeowners who are not able to afford home repairs.
NTX Now host Ron Corning caught up with NBC-5's senior investigative reporter Scott Friedman to dig deeper into what's going on.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the 'listen' button above.
Confusing language
Friedman said the NBC-5 investigative team obtained records from the City of Dallas that show the city has now issued 57 citations to 34 different properties — the first citations stemming from violation detected by the A.I.-powered cameras and then reviewed by city personnel.
"We also learned that the city has now opened 300 new code enforcement cases on properties in Dallas where the cameras detected a violation and 3,700 people have now received what the city calls a courtesy notice, which tells them we've detected violations on your property," Friedman said.
Those courtesy notices ask residents to voluntarily take care of those violations and suggests that they could face further enforcement action if they don't.
"The city is saying you're not going to get a citation directly as a result of one of those courtesy notices," he said. "But if an inspector comes back down the road or a neighbor complains, you could get a citation."
"So, the language in the letter seems to suggest that this is a warning, that you could face further action as [residents] are not going get a citation just because you received the courtesy notice," he continued. "However if the violations remain on the property and an inspector comes by later, you could."
Blight scores
Friedman say in just four months, city cameras detected 21,000 possible code violations on properties and assigned a blight score to each. Four is the most severe violations, one is the least.
"We asked the city what they do with that," Friedman said. "They tell us that they use the blight score just to prioritize these detections for review by a human code compliance officer."
Impact to low-income neighborhoods
NBC-5 reporters heard from residents and some civil liberties groups, who worry the city may use the blight scores to ramp up code enforcement in certain neighborhoods, particularly those that have been gentrified.
"The worry that we heard from some residents is, 'Are they going to start increasing enforcement to try to drive people out? To see if the city can then eventually get that that property to private developers who may have other other ideas for it?'" Friedman said. "The city insists that's not the case, that that is not their intent here."
The city also told NBC-5 that they do not profile any particular properties or look at demographics of certain neighborhoods when deploying these cameras. But Friedman said of the 57 new citations that the city has issued, 68% were in three city council districts in South Dallas that are predominantly Black and Hispanic.
Friedman says even some city council members, including Chad West, expressed concern that this program inadvertently targets the poor.
Ron Corning is a co-host of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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