Daniel Wu, The Washington Post; Can police use robots to kill? San Francisco voted yes.
"Adam Bercovici, a law enforcement expert and former Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant, told The Post that while policies for robotic lethal force must be carefully written, they could be useful in rare situations. He referenced an active-shooter scenario like the one Dallas officers encountered.
“If I was in charge, and I had that capability, it wouldn’t be the first on my menu,” he said. “But it would be an option if things were really bad.”
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, worried that San Francisco could instead end up setting a dangerous precedent.
“In my knowledge, this would be the first city to take this step of passing a law authorizing killer robots,” Cahn told The Post.
Cahn expressed concern that the legislation would lead other departments to push for similar provisions, or even to the development of more weaponized robots. In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., the police equipment company Axon announced plans to develop drones equipped with Tasers to incapacitate school shooters but canned the idea after nine members of the company’s artificial-intelligence ethics advisory board resigned in protest."
