Brownsville, in south Texas, uses technology from SHI International, a smart city technology provider, to monitor crowds, illegal dumping, vehicle thefts and other events. The technology makes use of AI to analyze visual data for particular incidents. “For example, tell me when somebody dumps trash in a public space. Tell me when there is an animal that is being aggressive, a person with a weapon, a car standing in an unauthorized location … people falling in parks and not getting up, things like that,” Brownsville CIO Jorge Cardenas said in March, explaining how the technology fits in the city’s tech ecosystem. As a border city, Brownsville is on the watch for stolen cars that may be heading into Mexico. The city’s cameras are able to scan license plates and compare the data to stolen car databases. Illegal dumping has also been a problem, with residents dumping debris in and around waterways and other areas. “Now we have cameras in strategic locations where people will do this a lot of times, and we have caught lot of people dumping mattresses, dumping tires, just trash,” Cardenas said. Similarly, he said, crowd monitoring “helps us to control the crowd, and identify things like weapons detection.” That level of surveillance may be helpful for city operations, but it may also not sit well with the public or digital privacy advocates. The data, Cardenas stressed, “never leaves our city data center, and access is strictly limited to assigned city employees.” “We intentionally chose to keep everything in-house, both to ensure the privacy and security of our community’s information, and to avoid the significant costs associated with external services,” he said in an email. The city’s relationship with SHI, which includes Centific’s VerityAI, NVIDIA AI and Lenovo’s AI-Accelerated platforms, delivered through SHI’s Smart City solution, only