One effect of AB 481 is to add local surveillance to hardware, such as the kind obtained through a US Department of Defense program that sends billions of dollars worth of military equipment such as armored vehicles and munitions to local police departments. Equipment from the program was used against protesters following the 2014 police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
Earlier this year, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin amended San Francisco’s design policy for military-grade police equipment to explicitly prohibit the use of robots to inflict violence against a person. But an amendment proposed this month by SFPD argued that police should be free to use robot power because its officers should be ready to respond to incidents that left several people dead. “In some cases, lethal force against a threat is the only option to limit those mass casualties,” the amendment said.
Ahead of yesterday’s vote, Brian Cox, director of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office’s Integrity Unit, called the change a contradiction to the progressive values the city has long stood for and urged regulators to consider the SFPD’s proposal. to reject. “This is a false choice, based on fear mongering and a desire to write their own rules,” he said in a letter to the board of trustees.
Cox said lethal robots on SF streets can wreak havoc, exacerbated by “SFPD’s long history of using excessive force, especially against people of color.” The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights have also spoken out against the policy.
The San Francisco Police Department has disclosed that it has 17 robots, although only 12 are operational. They include search and rescue robots designed for use after a natural disaster such as an earthquake, as well as models that can be equipped with a shotgun, explosives or pepper spray.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin referred to the possibility of police using explosives during the debate ahead of yesterday’s vote. During a standoff in Philadelphia in 1985, police dropped explosives from a helicopter on a home, sparking a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed 61 homes.
Peskin called that one of the most horrific and illegal incidents in U.S. law enforcement history, but said the fact that nothing like it ever happened in San Francisco gave him a measure of comfort. He eventually voted to allow SFPD to use lethal robots. But he added the restriction that only the Chief of Police, Assistant Chief of Operations or Deputy Chief of Special Operations can approve the use of deadly force with a robot, along with language urging consideration of de-escalation.
Approving killer robots is the latest twist in a series of police technology laws from the San Francisco tech hub. After a law passed in 2018 banning police use of Tasers, overseeing surveillance technology and banning the use of facial recognition in 2019, city leaders gave police access to footage from private security cameras in September.
Supervisor Dean Preston referred to San Francisco’s inconsistent record on police technology in his dissenting opinion yesterday. “If police shouldn’t be trusted with Tasers, they certainly shouldn’t be trusted with killer robots,” he said. “We have a police force, not an army.”
San Francisco’s new policy comes at a time when police are gaining more and more access to robots, and those robots are becoming more and more capable. Most existing police robots move slowly on tracks, but police forces in New York and Germany are starting to use robots on legs, such as the agile four-legged friend Spot Mini.
Axon, manufacturer of the Taser, has proposed adding the weapon to drones to stop mass shootings. And in China, researchers are working on quadrupeds that work together with small drones to track down suspects.
Boston Dynamics, a pioneer of legged robots, and five other robot manufacturers published an open letter in October objecting to arming their robots. Signatories said they felt a renewed sense of urgency to state their position because of “a small number of people who have visibly publicized their improvised efforts to weaponize commercially available robots.” But as robotics becomes more advanced and less expensive, there are plenty of competitors without such reservations. Ghost Robotics, a Pennsylvania company in pilot projects with the U.S. military and Department of Homeland Security on the U.S.-Mexico border, is allowing customers to mount weapons on its legged robots.
