At the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns, Erik Johnson had an idea. He had been experimenting with GoPro cameras mounted on cars driving through San Diego’s empty streets. Johnson, an urban economist, wondered whether the technology could help cities manage public space more effectively. If municipalities had comprehensive, up-to-date, street-level data on what was happening on the ground, they could deploy police and other resources more efficiently. Johnson and his partner, Anya Samek, eventually launched Placemetry to provide these insights to public- and private-sector clients.
New York City’s ability to address quality-of-life problems is increasingly constrained by staffing shortages. The NYPD’s headcount is down 11 percent since 2019, and citing “limited resources,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrapped plans to hire an additional 5,000 recruits. Other agencies face similar challenges: compared with 2019, the city has 20 percent fewer traffic-enforcement agents and 46 percent fewer special officers assigned to homelessness. As a result, departments are often forced to prioritize major responsibilities over chronic problems like trash, graffiti, illegal vending, and street encampments.
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The consequences are visible. According to the Citizens Budget Commission, just 34 percent of New Yorkers rated the city’s quality of life as good or excellent in 2025, down from 51 percent in 2017. Public approval of government services, public safety, and the use of taxpayer dollars has also declined.
Technology offers one way to stretch limited resources. New York already collects vast amounts of information through systems like 311, which allows residents to report potholes, trash, damaged property, and abandoned vehicles, as well as through NYPD crime data. But much of that information is incomplete, delayed, or dependent on residents reporting problems in the first place.
As Anya Samek notes, “it [currently] takes a year to count the homeless in Los Angeles.” Many problems go unreported because cities rely on “proxies, like 311 data.” Automating data collection could provide agencies with more timely, comprehensive information, allowing them to deploy personnel where they are needed most while reducing costs.
Placemetry’s approach uses 3D cameras mounted on vehicles to collect street-level imagery. AI algorithms then analyze the images to generate actionable insights for agencies. The system can collect data on more than 1,000 properties per hour. The same technology could be used to monitor streets, public property, and road conditions.
“You can use it for preparedness for natural disasters, for hurricane mitigation, and anything else you can see from the street,” Samek said. She also pointed to New Mexico, where towns need data to apply for grants for asbestos remediation. Vehicle imagery, she said, could be used to “give the city a prioritized list of properties that they could then send inspectors out to manually investigate.”
For Johnson, 3D street imaging is the “safest approach” to digitization. “You see exactly what you’d see going down the street,” he said. It’s faster and more complete. “We blur out license plates and faces, and we don’t use personalized information.”
For a populous city like New York, such technology would help identify emerging problems as they happen. That would enable agencies to direct existing staff and resources far more efficiently.
The NYPD already has a similar, but less comprehensive, system in place through Compstat, a crime statistics and accountability process that has transformed policing since it launched in 1994. Incorporating modern technology into Compstat would supercharge that process.
New York City is already leveraging 3D imagery to a limited extent. In 2017, it awarded a $5.3 million contract to Cyclomedia, which provides streetscape imagery data to help the Department of Finance assess properties, assist the Department of Transportation in cataloging infrastructure, and support other municipal functions. Use of that technology could be expanded to other departments.
Weekly street-level imagery could help New York City agencies target resources more effectively. The Department of Sanitation could identify chronic trash hotspots and detect graffiti on public property. The Department of Homeless Services could track encampments and deploy case workers where they are most needed. And the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene could compare vendor licenses with real-world activity, crack down on illegal vending, and adjust license issuance accordingly.
It would also enable residents to know exactly where and when the city has been addressing problems—such as the 100,000 potholes that Mayor Mamdani claims to have filled—by directly showcasing the visual change.
Ambition and money alone aren’t enough to improve the quality of life in New York. The government must make the best use of its resources. Expanding the use of innovative technologies is a promising path toward smarter governance in the city.