The city of Sarnia, Canada has initiated an AI-powered phone response system to receive and triage calls regarding homelessness. Reports from the media and the Sarnia police have claimed both that the service will: a) allow homeowners to submit concerns regarding by-law infringements or perceived community safety issues, and b) help people without stable homes connect to support services. This new system seems to be both guiding requests for services for those experiencing homelessness but also facilitating complaints about them.
As a team of scholars interested in the human right to housing, over criminalization of poverty, and ethical AI, we have strong concerns about this kind of dual-purpose reporting system.
Two red flags stood out to our research team:
- The phone system is being run through Sarnia police, and
- the system incorporates artificial intelligence tools.
Here’s why we’re worried:
People will always complain, so how do we handle it?
Many people feel compelled to report instances when they see folks sleeping or living rough. Sometimes community reporting is grounded in genuine concern, and a desire to connect unhoused people with assistance. Unfortunately, reporting is also often grounded in a desire to make people in poverty invisible. Seeing someone living rough may elicit other attitudes or beliefs as well, including concerns about being unsafe, perceived criminal activity, and more.
Unfortunately, this kind of NIMBY response is common, whether people call by-law enforcement or the police. We recognize that an automated system could address people’s desire to report their concern without leading to potential police contacts or overwhelming emergency lines with non-emergency calls.
However, phone systems like the one being adopted in Sarnia can perpetuate a criminalizing approach to homelessness and encampments—especially since the line is running through the Sarnia Police. We know that a criminalizing approach that can lead to forced evictions fails to meet the needs of people living rough. It also fails to respect their human rights and rarely leads to long-term and sustainable change. Unfortunately, criminalization often becomes the default when there’s a real or perceived shortage of resources to adequately support those sleeping rough.
How do we ensure information on people in need goes to services that can best address this need?
AI phone triaging for people in need also isn’t the answer. In the context of homelessness, people can be in very immediate and severe crisis, and what works when you’re calling your insurance company with a simple question might not stand up to the complexity of finding shelter in an immediate crisis.
Having an AI system respond to such needs carries high risk. We know AI phone systems can struggle with accuracy, misdirecting people, and creating frustrating loops. In the same way we wouldn’t have an AI nurse do triage in an emergency room, having AI phone systems triage for people in deep housing need creates too high a risk for a fatal error. This is the case both for people using the phone line to report the activity of someone else, or someone calling to personally seek support.
Our recommendation: a human response.
A homelessness response system should follow two promising practices:
- It should live within the social service system rather than within the policing system to avoid criminalizing responses; and
- Have a real person on the line to receive calls and guide responses.
In the case of a neighbour registering a complaint, having a human record this alleviates the need that people have to be heard, and allows complaints to be noted. In the case where people are calling with genuine concern or because they themselves have a need for service, the human on the line can triage this call to the appropriate service, including EMS, congruent with the service need.
We acknowledge that many communities do use such response lines and community members are often left frustrated where they identify a very vulnerable person living rough, call in for help, and never have a worker make it out or make it out in a timely manner. Having additional phone systems available to neighbours does alleviate some of the strain on emergency lines, but also increases the number of cases redirected to service providers.
There’s really no way around it: governments need to increase resources for up-front, human-based support services. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; doing so is far, far less expensive than policing, paramedics, hospitals, and jails.
Homelessness reveals more than housing injustice in our society, it exposes deeper processes of social exclusion and dehumanization and forces us to question how we communicate and respond to people in crisis. Housing response lines operated by police systems perpetuate a criminalizing response to what is a social issue. And AI response lines for urgent needs make this response even less human-focused and carry too high a risk of error. Human workers responding on phone lines connected to social services, not police or by-law officers, is a much more promising and sustainable practice to properly support those living rough.