Use of robot to kill suspect opens door for others

Police Chief David Brown spoke to the media Monday, calling his department the best in the nation, and saying investigators will look into all leads to make sure no one else was involved in the downtown attack last week that left five officers dead.

Ambushes against police on Thursday and Friday in Tennessee, Georgia and Missouri added to a sense of being under siege and vulnerable at a time when many departments already were grappling with heightened community suspicion over the use of deadly force. And a precedent set under emergency conditions can easily expand in future cases. But it is completely predictable that such an unprecedented action by police would spur conversation about when it is and isn’t appropriate to use automated machinery to kill risky suspects. This particular type of robot had been used in the military before-to defuse bombs-but had not been used in a policing context. Contrary to fictional movies, cutting the right wires in the right sequence on a bomb is incredibly risky work.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group, said that as 90 percent of America’s 18,000 police forces have under 50 officers, many simply can not afford the kind of staff needed to respond as quickly as needed to mass shootings.

In this case, the device’s arm extension was carrying an approximately one-pound brick of the plastic C4 explosive, plus a detonating cord in a tactic that is used by the military in combat situations.

Another fairly common use has been to send robots into high-risk areas during armed standoffs, utilizing its mounted camera and video feed to safely examine a physical location; or to search for victims in environments too unsafe for emergency responders.

College officials have not been allowed to assess the damage done to the building because it has been under police control, Ann Hatch, a spokeswoman for the Dallas County Community College, which runs the building, told The Washington Post on Saturday. Think of drones flying over Pakistan or robots that do microsurgery. I have been a part of such discussions myself, but I am not aware of it actually occurring.

Robots in the past have stopped a lot of risky situations. “We feel like the biggest gang is the police out here because they face no repercussions”. A peaceful resolution is always their goal.

The choice was one that Michael D. Reitan, chief of police for the West Fargo Police Department, said he would have made, if he’d been in similar circumstances.

To the editor: It is somewhat puzzling when we question the ethics of police tactics using technology. He began reassigning officers from desk jobs to foot patrols, a move that was praised by criminal justice experts but angered the police unions, who demanded his resignation. “They should have arrested him and brought him to trial”.

The colleagues of Dallas police Sr. Cpl. But they did not. Over a three-day period, police arrested about 200 people. He was a highly trained and well-armed killer that obviously was prepared to die and bragged about explosive devices. “I’d do it again, I’d do it again to save our officers lives”. But that wasn’t an option either. It is my personal opinion that a robot should never be in a position to take a human life on its own volition, without human supervision. To those people we should try to teach the lesson of Anne Frank, written in a hidden room while being hunted by Nazis for imprisonment, torture and death – a more fearful situation than most of us will ever know. Chief David Brown said he told his SWAT team to devise a plan that would keep officers out of the kill zone and take out the suspect.