The trash can that had been overflowing for three days

1. The scene

   Tuesday morning at the public spaces department of a mid-sized city. A city officer opens her inbox: forty reports, four meetings, and the cleaning budget that has to be closed this week. In a neighborhood at the far north end, a trash can has been overflowing since Saturday: bags around it, flattened cardboard leaning against it, a mattress. Nobody from the department has been past, because the collection route doesn’t come around until Thursday.

2. Where it breaks

   The city has more than four thousand cameras. Nobody watches them: there’s no control room with four thousand screens, and there never will be. They’re there so you can look back at what happened, not to tell you what is happening now. So the neighborhood finds out before the city does.

3. What happens

   On Tuesday at ten thirty, someone posts a photo of the bin. By eleven, the photo has two hundred comments and the name of the neighborhood on it. At eleven fifteen, the officer learns about a three-day-old problem from a social network. There’s been a camera pointing at that bin since day one.

4. With IRIS

   IRIS watches that camera just like the other four thousand, all at once. Operations writes the rule down once — if the trash can has been overflowing for more than two hours, tell me — and IRIS applies it without anyone having to think about it again. On Saturday afternoon, the officer would have gotten a picture, the street and the time. A truck goes past on Sunday morning, and on Monday there is nothing to post. The decision is still hers: what IRIS saves her is finding out late.

A city doesn’t need more cameras. It needs the ones it already has to know when to speak up.