San Francisco police are allowed to use remote-controlled robots to kill suspects. The city’s board of trustees approved a controversial policy which allows police robots “to be used as a lethal force option when the risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other available force option.”
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) said it does not own pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm its current machines. reports sky news. As SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie explained in a statement, the department’s robots can now be equipped with explosives “to engage, incapacitate or disorient violent, armed or dangerous suspects” in “extreme circumstances to prevent further loss of to save or prevent innocent lives”.
Currently, the SFPD owns 17 robots, 12 of which are operational. The machines can be broadly divided into two categories: large and medium-sized crawler robots used to remotely probe or detonate explosives (such as the Remote control F6A and Qinetiq Talon) and smaller bots designed to be thrown into target areas for reconnaissance and surveillance (such as the iRobot FirstLook and Recon Robotics Throwbot). All robots owned by the SFPD are designed to be operated primarily by humans and have limited autonomous functionality.
Police forces in the US have already used remote-controlled robots to kill suspects. The first incident is believed to have occurred in 2016, when police in Dallas used a bomb-disposal robot kill a sniper who had shot and killed five officers during a rally. At the time, the move was praised by some for quickly ending an hours-long standoff, and criticized by others for effectively enabling police to execute a suspect without exhausting alternative options. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at the time that officers saw “no option but to use our bomb robot and put a device on the extension so it could explode where the suspect was.”
in San Francisco, AP News reports that the policy was discussed for two hours before being approved by a vote of eight to three. One proponent, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, said those who oppose the policy “may start looking at the public as if they were anti-police”. Board chairman Shamann Walton, who voted against the proposal, meanwhile replied that he was not against the police, but “for people of color.”
Walton said: “We are constantly being asked to do things in the name of increasing guns and opportunities for negative interaction between police and people of color. This is just one of those things.”
The proposal was criticized by numerous civil rights groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was typical of police-military mission creep, the process of deploying hardware developed for use in war zones against civilians. “We have already seen this with military quality Predator drones flying over protestsand police buzzing at the window of an activist’s home with drones,” said Matthew Guariglia of the EFF in a blog post.
Elsewhere in the US, police departments have rejected similar proposals. The Oakland Police Department initially approved the use of robots to kill suspects remotely, but later reversed his decision without explanation. The policy had been criticized, with a report from The interception revealing discussion by agents about the possibility of arming a robot with a shotgun shell.
