(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Reeling from a wave of deadly criminal violence and a spike in property crimes spawned by far-leftist criminal justice reforms implemented by San Francisco’s Democrat juntas, the city’s police department wants to unleash an army of robocops with licenses to kill.
The department has asked the city’s board of supervisors for permission to use its cadre of deadly robots to hunt and kill targeted suspects that have been deemed too dangerous to be pursued by humans, according to the Bay Area’s Mission Local.
The request received a tepid response when it was made last month, and the board of supervisors was rebuffed when it tried to limit the robots’s lethal potential. The board’s chair changed the proposed policy by adding the sentence, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”
That didn’t fly with police, who returned the policy with a thick red line through the board’s suggestion. The new language “codifies the department’s authority to use lethal force via robots,” reported Mission Local, adding that it “could mark a legal crossing of the Rubicon for the city: Robot use-of-force has never before been approved, nor has it ever been prohibited, in San Francisco.”
The final proposal reads: “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to SFPD.”
The city’s police said that none of the department’s 17 robots had ever been used to attack anyone. The robocops, which are remote-controlled, are usually used “to investigate and defuse potential bombs or to surveil areas too awkward or dangerous for officers to access.”
Those parameters also would expand under the new policy, to include “training and simulations, criminal apprehensions, critical incidents, exigent circumstances, executing a warrant or during suspicious device assessments.”
The board of supervisors’s rules committee has already approved a draft of the policy, which is slated for a full board vote next week. The proposal is already drawing a backlash.
“We are living in a dystopian future, where we debate whether the police may use robots to execute citizens without a trial, jury, or judge,” said Tifanei Moyer, senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
“This is not normal,” she told Mission Local. “No legal professional or ordinary resident should carry on as if it is normal.”
