
When police use robots to kill people - anigbrowl
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-08/when-police-use-robots-to-kill-people
======
jmadsen
"When things get easier to do, they tend to be done too much."

\---

When you only have a SWAT team:

"We have him cornered, with no food or water and limited ammunition. We don't
want to lose any more officers. Can we just blockade him and wait him out,
then take him to trial?"

When you have a robot that can carry a bomb:

"We can just execute him at no risk to anyone."

\---

I don't know many details, and obviously wasn't part of the conversation that
took place to arrive at this decision.

I do look at the decision to execute someone who executed people on your side
in response to the perception that you were executing people on his side...

Whenever a bad cycle is seen to be developing, it is the responsibility of the
leaders in the community to quickly break that cycle.

I worry in the long run that we will come to regret this "quick fix".

~~~
chroma
> I don't know many details, and obviously wasn't part of the conversation
> that took place to arrive at this decision.

The shooter claimed to have explosives elsewhere in the city that he would
remotely detonate. In that situation, lethal force is absolutely justified.

~~~
wavefunction
Considering such an elaborate claim and taking it at face value as the
authorities would in your take, would it not be even more potentially
dangerous to take the guy out?

What if he had some sort of system where he has a personal transponder hooked
to a dead man switch that triggers when the signal stops?

If someone told me they had bombs all over the city yet had not detonated them
after being involved in the shootout as they were, I might wonder at the
veracity as someone like that would surely have set them off already?

I guess it's easier when there aren't innocent lives on the line to follow the
lines of logic I've proposed, but they seem completely natural and realistic.

~~~
chroma
The possibilities look like this:

• Attacker doesn't have bombs, police blow him up: Dead attacker, everyone
else OK.

• Attacker has bombs, police blow him up: Dead attacker, everyone else most
likely OK. (Only not OK if attacker has a certain kind of dead man's switch.)

• Attacker doesn't have bombs, police try to take him alive: Maybe dead
attacker, maybe cops hurt/killed.

• Attacker has bombs, police try to take him alive: Maybe dead attacker,
probably cops hurt/killed, probably civilians hurt/killed.

A dead man's switch is very unlikely, because it's hard to make reliable. If
not set up to allow for intermittent interruptions, it's guaranteed detonate
explosives early. If it's only set up to transmit "detonate" when let go of,
its destruction can prevent detonation. Also, the shooter would have mentioned
if he actually had a dead man's switch. I'm betting he didn't think of that.

It wasn't likely that the shooter had explosives, but considering the possible
outcomes, incapacitating him as quickly as possible was the best of the crappy
choices available. I think the cops made the right decision in this case.

~~~
wavefunction
Why would you go to the trouble of placing "bombs all over the city" if not to
use them? I would take that threat and the fact that they had not been
detonated to signal that the shooter had no bombs in the first place.

~~~
chroma
> I would take that threat and the fact that they had not been detonated to
> signal that the shooter had no bombs in the first place.

Are you so sure that you'd be willing to bet the lives of potentially hundreds
of innocent people? The Dallas PD wasn't.

It's easy to be confident now that we have more information. At the time, the
guy had already shot a dozen cops. He had body armor. He'd held off SWAT in a
firefight. All actions that attested to his preparation and training. His
claims about bombs were quite plausible at the time. Likely exaggerated, but
still plausible.

Let's say the police thought there was a 1 in 50 chance that he had planted
one or more bombs. Would you want them to risk a 2% chance of potentially
hundreds injuries and deaths just to take the guy alive? I wouldn't.

------
gshulegaard
The first question to ask here is if the use of Lethal Force was justified?

> "In the United States, the use of deadly force is often granted to law
> enforcement officers when the person or people in question are believed to
> be an immediate danger to people around them. For example, an armed man
> flaunting a firearm in a shopping mall without regard to the safety of those
> around him, and refusing or being unwilling to negotiate, would warrant
> usage of deadly force, as a means to protect others." [1]

At face value of the reading above, I believe the decision to use Lethal Force
was justified.

Once agreeing on the above (and not everyone may, just forwarding my own
logic), then the fact that in this instance a Robot/Bomb/Robot Bomb is an
unimportant implementation detail.

Some people want to argue that "Bomb Bots" make applying lethal force "easier"
but I haven't seen convincing evidence to support that claim. As far as I can
tell, applying an explosive to a robot and remotely detonating has a niche
application but in general is not easier than applying a marksman and a sniper
rifle.

But again, if we agree that the _why_ applied to the decision is acceptable,
then I am not terribly interested in the _how_ so long as there is no
collateral damage (as there wasn't in this case).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_force)

~~~
soyiuz
> Once agreeing on the above (and not everyone may, just forwarding my own
> logic), then the fact that in this instance a Robot/Bomb/Robot Bomb is an
> unimportant implementation detail.

That would be like saying that innovations in assembly robotics were just an
"unimportant implementation" of industrial production more generally.

This community is usually quick to recognize the potential of robotics in
other fields, particularly when coupled with autonomous operation and AI. The
idea of using "smart" bullets or drone targeted strikes domestically certainly
represents a significant milestone in the projection of police power.

Robotics develop along a certain, now familiar, trajectory. To understand the
importance of this event extrapolate from other fields, farther along the
curve.

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chroma
The shooter was holed-up and claimed to have explosives elsewhere that he
would remotely detonate.[1] The robot was controlled by a human. There was no
autonomous decision-making involved. Morally, what the Dallas PD did is no
different than sniping the guy or tossing a grenade at him. In short, this
article is almost all FUD.

1\. [http://www.ktxs.com/news/national/dallas-pd-shooting-
suspect...](http://www.ktxs.com/news/national/dallas-pd-shooting-suspect-
wanted-to-kill-white-officers/40413768)

------
leroy_masochist
I think this whole article misses the point. The SWAT team decided to kill the
gunman with demo. They used a robot instead of one or more officers to place
the demo in order to eliminate the possibility that the officer(s) involved in
placing the demo would be killed in the process of doing so. The technology
involved here is at least a decade old _in implementation_ ; EOD guys were
doing this all the time during Al-Fajr, for example. I'm actually very
surprised that this is the first example of cops in the United States
employing this particular TTP.

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cs2818
Is anyone else concerned that as robots become more readily available and
pervasive they will be an avenue for staging attacks from a distance?

It seems the police found value in this robot as it allowed them to neutralize
a threat without risking human life, but what prevents non-police entities
from doing the same? If it is simply a high barrier of entry into acquiring
and using robotic systems we may need to start pondering how to mitigate
malicious uses before they begin to occur.

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mountaineer22
Why not simply allow the police to carry grenades?

~~~
wavefunction
Or tanks. They could have shot the building with the main battle cannon of a
tank with little risk to any officers.

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hoodoof
It appears that if the alleged crime is sufficiently serious then a preemptive
execution is seen as justified.

~~~
toss1941
How is it any different from a classic swat team pointing their guns at a
house, ready to fire in a blink of an eye?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
> How is it any different from a classic swat team pointing their guns at a
> house, ready to fire in a blink of an eye?

They don't shoot until there is an imminent threat +. A trapped animal in a
hole is not a threat so long as it stays in the hole. Blowing him up as an
expedient is unprecedented in the civilian realm.

\+ Unless you've been trained on the shoot-first-cleanup-the-mess-later
tactics that many of our newly minted veterans turned police seem to cling to.

~~~
sampo
> _shoot-first-cleanup-the-mess-later tactics that many of our newly minted
> veterans turned police seem to cling to._

Yesterday, regarding the Falcon Heights MN shooting, there were commenters in
Reddit who said that that they were Iraq veterans and that they had tighter
rules and discipline about shooting people who are not shooting at them, than
the US police has. And that these careless shootings are done by inexperienced
policemen who are too scared of the situation to be able to think clearly.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Yeah. And we've only killed 116 civilians by drone. I wouldn't seek the
unbiased truth on Reddit.

~~~
sampo
There should be enough unjustified police killings to gather a dataset and
see, in how many cases was the policeman an army veteran?

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lectrolincoln
nothing new [http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-
rad...](http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-radicals-
home-in-philadelphia.html?pagewanted=all)

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outworlder
I am not sure what's so impressive about a robot used in this way.

What is impressive is that they would do this in an urban environment. What
about possible collateral damage?

~~~
adrenalinelol
They had in cornered in a parking garage, and the "siege" had lasted for hours
@ that point, most civilians had probably cleared the area.

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soVeryTired
If you outlaw drone bombs, then only outlaws will have drone bombs.

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cwkoss
Robotic suicide bombers - the future of policing?

