The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has drafted a proposed policy allowing them to use robots with deadly force to kill suspects in exceptional circumstances.
The draft policy proposal details the controversial requests and will be debated by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Rules Committee next week.
The document features several proposals on how the department wants to use its 17 robot collection.
According to police spokesperson Robert Rueca, the robots are remote-controlled and usually utilized to investigate areas deemed too dangerous for police officers to enter, and to diffuse bombs, adding they have never been used to attack people.
The proposal outlines several ways the department would like to use the robots, including training and simulations, executing warrants, apprehending criminals, and when the police check out suspicious devices, among other interventions.
The proposal also includes a clause for police to use their robots to kill people but only when there is an imminent threat of loss of life for a member of the public or a police officer and the robot’s ability to kill outweighs any other force available to the department.
The SFPD has several robot models that the police can fit with weapons, including newer models of the Remotec robots like the F5A model and the QinetiQ Talon.
One way the robots can become deadly is by attaching a disruptor device that uses shotgun shells. The machine then fires bullets at the suspect. Another technique that Dallas police used in 2016 is to strap the robot with explosives and blow the suspect up.
Police can quickly modify most SFPD droids and add machine guns and grenade launchers.
The proposal says that giving robots the ability to kill would aid police officers with what they termed as “ground support and situational awareness.”
Three committee members and supervisors scrutinized the draft policy over several weeks. After scrutiny, the committee’s chair member attempted to limit SFPD’s robot use, writing that SFPD must not use robots as a force against anyone.
The SFPD replaced the clause with language that seems to justify the use of deadly force by robots if a member of the public or a police officer is in imminent danger.
San Francisco has never approved the use of force by robots, but it has also never prohibited it either.
Tifanei Moyer, an attorney at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, condemned the proposal, saying that the city was debating whether or not to allow police to use robots to execute citizens was proof that we are living in a “dystopian future.” She added that debating the proposal wasn’t normal.
Out of SFPD’s seventeen robots, 12 are fully functional.
The first instance of police using a robot to kill a suspect in the US was in 2016 when officers from the Dallas police department strapped a bomb to a robot and blew up a suspect who had shot and killed five police officers. The explosives on the $151,000 robot killed the suspect but only left the robot with minor damage.
