The San Francisco Police Department is requesting permission for their robots to use deadly force

The San Francisco Police Department is currently applying to the city’s Board of Supervisors for permission to use robots to kill suspects that law enforcement agencies deem a sufficient threat that the “risk of death of members of the public, officials and any other force is imminent.”

predominates option available for SFPD.” The draft policy, authored by the SFPD itself, also aims to “exclude hundreds of assault rifles from their inventory of military weapons and not include personnel costs in the price of their weapons,” according to a report. Mission Local.

As Mission Local notes that this proposal has already met with significant opposition both within and outside the Governing Board. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who initially balked at the use of force requirements, added “robots must not be used to force people” into the political language.

The SFPD removed that wording in a later draft, which I considered a lifelong San Francisco resident unaware there was anything he could do.

The three-member Rules Committee, which Peskin chairs, then unanimously approved the draft and submitted it to the full Board of Supervisors for a November 29 vote. Peskin apologized for the decision by claiming that “there might be scenarios where the use of deadly force would be the only option.”

The police currently maintain a dozen fully functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspection and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD demonstrated in 2016, they are also excellent platforms for bombing. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with empty shotgun shells, which are used to violently disrupt the internal workings of an explosive device, although nothing prevents police from using live rounds when necessary, the Oakland Police Department recently admitted to that city’s Civil Oversight Board.

While San Francisco has never explicitly allowed robots to take human lives, lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are becoming increasingly common in modern warfare. Anti-personnel mines, one of the earliest iterations of automated weapons, have been banned since 1997 (but tell that to the mines already in the ground) and fully automated defense systems such as shipboard Phalanx systems have been deployed since the 1970s. Autonomous attack systems such as UAVs and combat drones have been deployed for years, but have always required a human in the loop to take responsibility for actually firing the weapons. Now the SFPD — the same department that regularly costs the city six-figure settlements for its excessive use of force and obstructs investigations into its affinity with baton beatings — wants to wield that same life-or-death power over San Francisco’s civilians.

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