There's a Florida city that wants to strap AI cameras onto your garbage truck so it can scan your yard for code violations every single time it drives by. And it's completely legal.

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Here's what's going on. Cape Coral was sitting in a city council meeting back in February listening to City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn pitch cameras that scan your yard and the front of your house for stuff like overgrown grass, a bad roof, peeling paint, basically the whole code violation checklist, except now a computer's doing the looking instead of a person, and it could ding you every single garbage day. The company selling this thing is called City Detect, and they market it as "The Good AI." Dallas already approved over $850,000 for a nearly identical system. This isn't a one-off. It's a trend, and it's moving fast.

You'd think something like this would need a special law to allow it. It doesn't. Cape Coral's own city manager told council this falls under stuff the city already has the right to do, because they used the same kind of AI after Hurricane Ian to spot roofs that still weren't fixed, and since nobody sued them over it, they're treating it as fair game to use again. After enough residents pushed back, the city said they're not moving forward right now because it's "cost prohibitive." Not illegal. Not off the table. Just too expensive, for now. Change the budget, and this comes right back.

And garbage truck cameras are nothing compared to what's already out there. Flock Safety has built a network of somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 cameras across the country that don't just read your license plate, they build what the company calls a "vehicle fingerprint" out of your car's make, body style, even bumper damage, and then run something called convoy analysis to flag which vehicles keep showing up together. Flock says cities are in full control of their own data and can turn off national sharing anytime. Except Mountain View, California found out their sharing setting had been switched on without their knowledge for 17 straight months, with 250 outside agencies running 600,000 searches on their data in a single year. Somewhere between 50 and 80 cities nationwide have now canceled their Flock contracts after finding the exact same thing happened to them.

Then there's Axon, the Taser and body cam company, which makes a streetlight-mounted camera that reads plates and livestreams straight to police with zero officers on site. Back in 2022 Axon also announced a Taser-mounted drone, and it caused so much backlash that 9 of the 12 people on their own ethics board quit in writing. Axon paused the announcement publicly. They never said they stopped building it.

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Now here's the part that should really worry you. You'd hope the people running these systems could at least be trusted with them. In Milwaukee, an officer used the department's Flock network to stalk his ex-girlfriend, running searches 179 times. The internal affairs detective assigned to investigate him used the same system on the same victim 17 more times and logged the reason as "training." Investigators later traced a hidden GPS tracker found under her car straight back to him. And this isn't just a Milwaukee problem. In Orange City, Florida, an officer ran his ex's plate through Flock at least 69 times in one summer, plus her mom's and dad's plates dozens more. Down in Monroe County, a deputy used the system to track a woman he'd met once and pulled her over.

So if the people running this technology can't stop themselves from abusing it, who exactly is supposed to stop your city from doing the same thing with a camera on a garbage truck? Every time a city wants a new surveillance tool, they lead with the same excuse: we're understaffed. Cape Coral used it. The fix isn't more cameras pointed at you, it's accountability pointed at them. Like public numbers on how many permits were opened? How many were closed? Is the time between open and closed permits shrinking? People need to see if their government's doing its job. My suggestion is we put AI cameras inside city hall. I bet everybody gets a whole lot more efficient.

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But none of this exists without one thing: money. Florida needs a law that stops cities from cutting private companies in on fine revenue, so nobody's profiting off how many tickets your neighborhood racks up. And that's exactly why voting yes on Amendment 3 this November matters here too. That's the property tax cut that drains the slush fund cities use to pay for everything from DEI consultants to nonprofits nobody's heard of, and yes, that same slush fund is what eventually pays for cameras on your garbage truck and drones with stun guns on them. No slush fund, no funding for the next scary idea somebody dreams up to watch you.

Grant Warrington

Think like an Investor

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