Tribune Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Negotiators had been talking for hours with the hunkered-down killer of five police officers in downtown Dallas when the man suddenly resumed firing with an assault rifle.
Fearing additional casualties, the officers deployed a small, remote-controlled robot to carry an explosive device near shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, which they then detonated, killing him.
“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Police Chief David Brown said Friday. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger .… We have confirmed that he’s been deceased because of the detonation of the bomb.”
The Dallas Police Department’s unprecedented use of an explosive-laden robot to kill an armed suspect ushers in a new phase in the militarization of U.S. police departments.
The tactic illustrates the lifesaving opportunities presented by advancing technologies and the transfer of second-hand military equipment to local police departments.
But it also raises difficult ethical questions about how and when such technologies should be deployed to allow police to kill a suspect with little or no risk to themselves.
As police departments acquire more robots that were once seen only in war zones, civilian law enforcement officers are pushing into territory forged by the CIA and the U.S. Air Force to kill terrorists, said Ryan Calo, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert on robotics and the law.
“This is not the beginning of killer robotics, domestically, but it is hard to distinguish this and a drone strike,” Calo said. “The police had exhausted their other options, they thought.”
While it was not immediately clear what type of robot the Dallas Police Department used to kill Johnson, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in April 2014 did receive through a Pentagon program a bomb-disposal robot valued at $10,000.
Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, said the lethal use of a robot is likely going to draw a lot of attention from law enforcement.
He said the MARCbot, which is primarily designed for delivering a remote view in life-threatening instances and handling live ordinance, has been jury-rigged by troops in Iraq to attack targets with mines.
At about 19 inches wide and 13 inches tall, the MARCbot is small and relatively inexpensive. Short for Multifunction, Agile, Remote-Controlled Robot, the device is made by Exponent Inc., an engineering and research firm in Menlo Park, California.
As far as ethical problems, Holland Michel said: “These robots are not autonomous. They do not make decisions on their own. They are sophisticated remote-control systems.”
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