San Francisco Vote to Allow Police Use of Deadly Robots Spurs Concern and Outrage

Paul Scharre, the vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank focused on national security issues, said the San Francisco proposal was “the exact opposite of what we should be using robots for in a policing context.”

Scharre, who is also the author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War,” said the advantage of using a robot is that it creates a safe distance between police officers and armed suspects, and thus police should try to “find ways to use that increased distance as a way to build more options for law enforcement to use” instead of lethal force.

The vote in San Francisco comes more than six years after police in Dallas used a robot with an explosive device to kill a suspect who was holed up inside a parking garage after an ambush in which five officers were killed and seven others were injured, along with two civilians.

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