That, Singer said, is why the department had explosives handy – sometimes the preferred way to deal with a bomb is to evacuate the area around it and use another bomb to blow it up. You might use the gripper to disassemble the device in the classic Hollywood movie cut-the-wire way you might shoot high-pressure water into it, and you might do a controlled detonation.” “You might use the device to open up a bag and see if there’s a bomb in it. “When there’s a suspected explosive device, a suspected IED, you have this device with a robotic arm and a gripper on it,” Singer explained. The “bomb robot” used is assumed to be the DPD’s bomb-disposal unit, a wheeled, remote-controlled (as opposed to autonomous) robot with a manipulator arm on top. And we need to develop regulations and policies now, because this surely won’t be the last instance we see police robots.” “In other words, I don’t think we have a framework for deciding objectively reasonable robotic force. It’s not clear how we should apply that if the threat is to a robot – and the police may be far away.” That, Joh added, is only one condition for the use of lethal force. On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed a group of police officers in Dallas, Texas, shooting and killing five officers, and injuring nine others. But we typically examine deadly force by the police in terms of an immediate threat to the officer or others. “Under federal constitutional law, excessive-force claims against the police are governed by the fourth amendment. “Lethally armed police robots raise all sorts of new legal, ethical, and technical questions we haven’t decided upon in any systematic way,” she said. Joh said she was worried that the decision by police to use robots to end lives had been arrived at far too casually. “Other options would have exposed our officers in grave danger,” Singer said. Brown said the decision protected police officers on a night when their lives were at greater risk than usual. Singer also said that he was “in no way, shape or form condemning” the DPD’s decision. You can see the parallels here.”ĭallas police chief on decision to use bomb disposal robot armed with explosive device Guardian But this soldier had improvised: “They duct-taped an explosive and you can figure out the rest. These robots aren’t autonomous, Singer emphasized – the Marcbot “is like a toy truck with a sensor and camera mount they’d use to drive up to a checkpoint”. Singer said that in the early 2000s, a solider he interviewed repurposed a surveillance robot called a Marcbot with a bomb. This is not the first time a robot designed with other functions in mind has been used as a weapon, but this kind of repurposing has until now been limited to the military. “As far as I know, it appears to be the first intentional use of a lethally armed robot by the police in the United States,” said Elizabeth Joh, law professor at the University of California at Davis. “There may be some story that comes along, but I’d think I’d have heard of it,” he said. Kristy Villasenor, Zamarripa’s wife, was attending a Texas Rangers baseball game in nearby Arlington when the shootings began, according to a post on Facebook.Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes about the technology of warfare, said he believed this was a first. The gunman sweeps from behind and fires several shots. One video purported to show the gunman move with a rifle toward a victim, presumably a police officer. Social media was awash in amateur videos of the shootings late Thursday, with images of civilians and police scrambling for cover while rifle fire echoed off buildings. The attack took place during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas in the wake of citizens killed by police in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn. Three suspects were detained, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said.īrown called the shootings an ambush-style attack by “snipers,” but by the end of Friday, state and federal officials said the carnage appeared to be the work of only one shooter. Johnson was killed by a police-guided robot using a small explosive charge after a standoff with police. Seven officers and two civilians were also wounded in the attack. He later helped train police in Iraq and Afghanistan as a contractor, according to The Associated Press. He served in the Marine Corps for three years in the administrative field and left the service in 1994, according to a Marine Corps spokesman. Dallas transit police officer Brent Thompson, 43, was also killed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |