Robot Snatches Rifle From Barricaded Suspect, Ends Standoff (latimes.com) 129
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the L.A. Times:
An hours-long standoff in the darkness of the high desert came to a novel end when Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies used a robot to stealthily snatch a rifle from an attempted murder suspect, authorities said Thursday.
Officials said the use of the robot to disarm a violent suspect was unprecedented for the Sheriff's Department, and comes as law enforcement agencies increasingly rely on military-grade technology to reduce the risk of injury during confrontations with civilians.
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
It was only later when the robot came back to also pull down a wire barricade that the 51-year-old suspect realized his gun was gone.
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
It was only later when the robot came back to also pull down a wire barricade that the 51-year-old suspect realized his gun was gone.
Re:the enemy (Score:4, Funny)
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Next logical step: Violent offenders using Robots to stage remote assaults.
It's been feasible for quite some years to load a remotely controlled vehicle up with explosives, and drive/fly it into a target. You can buy an off-the-shelf FPV rig that will function over a substantial distance, or you can use the cellular network. Yet, this is not happening. Why?
It's been feasible for basically forever to cut the chain and walk into any power substation, set some explosives, and walk away. Many towns and even cities in this country are fed by only one or maybe two lines which are easy t
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Yeah, now if WE were nefarious Dr. Evil types, WE would be able to fill full sized buses with the name of your favorite rental car company on the side right up to the pickup area of any major metropolitan area, loaded not with a single drum of witchbrew nitro but with dozens of them, with walls lined with preformed shrapnel on the terminal side and with a concrete wall on the other to direct the explosion (and likely with heavy heavy duty shocks:-). Then sure, we could remote pilot it into place in any te
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You are an idiot or an ignorant.
Possibly both at the same time! Let's see:
http://newatlas.com/silex-lase... [newatlas.com]
Hmmm, 1/5th the cost already affordable by nearly any "kitchen pot" dictatorship around the world. And this isn't new technology -- rumor in the physics world has it that this is how Israel has been making its bombs for decades. So right, not quite in my kitchen with my pots, but in a small warehouse somewhere? Maybe, if I have a few million and access to uranium 238 (which is, one profoundly hopes
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Basement stuff? I was kidding -- or being sarcastic if you prefer -- because while no, one cannot do it in a literal garage, it is still a technology well within the reach of middle-tier proliferation risks who might have a comparatively hard time getting their hands on Uranium.
I'd call it hyperbole. That's just me though.
but there is little doubt that one can make bombs from Thorium, and further, that the bombs you make are the nice, easy to manage Uranium bombs and not the nasty, prematurely detonating fizzling fissioning (unless you build them just right) plutonium bombs.
There is a lot of doubt that anyone can build a thorium bomb because no one has done so yet. Even using thorium to breed U-233 for a bomb is theoretical.
Your claim that someone can "simply" extract U-233 from a breeder is idiotic. Thorium breeders operate on slim margins of neutrons, extracting too many neutrons risks the reactor going sub-critical. Going sub-critical means the reaction stops. Removing U-233 means removing neutrons.
Thorium reactors require a
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"You too, sir, please come with us. Quietly. We have a robot here."
U-233 is worthless for bombs (Score:4, Informative)
U-233 bombs are theoretical and the handful of times it has been tried were failures. The "failures" didn't mean they didn't explode since the conventional explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction is sufficient to cause considerable damage and turn the core into a dirty bomb. Those that did achieve fission with U-233 did so only with a mix with another fuel, U-235 or Pu-239, and with a yield lower than expected. The value of U-233 to "boost" the yield of a weapon is debatable because of the results of these tests. Other materials and methods, like common natural uranium as a second or third stage, are much more feasible. This still leaves the value of U-233 as a primary fission source as theoretical.
Another problem with using U-233 as a weapon core is dealing with U-232 contamination. U-232 has a bad habit of decaying with it's (relatively) short half life and sometimes doing so with spontaneous fission. The radiation from the weapon core might be dealt with by using heavy shielding or by not caring if the laborers get potentially lethal doses of radiation. Another way to deal with it is to allow the U-232 to decay away but that requires lengthy planning. By "lengthy" I mean waiting out the ~70 year half life long enough that the unwanted isotopes decay away. If one is dealing with U-232 by simply not caring about the radiation load then there is still the problem of the spontaneous fission. I'm not sure what those effects would be but I assume it means a short shelf life for the weapon, a potential "fizzile" (extremely low yield), and possibly premature detonation. None of those effects can be good.
Use of U-233 as a weapon core is so far from practical that it may as well be considered impossible. Obtaining useful quantities of sufficiently pure U-235 and/or Pu-239 is so much easier that weaponizing U-233 will likely never be attempted again. If it is attempted then it will be by some people that are very desperate or people with enough experience in making nuclear weapons that the U-233 bomb would be more of a theoretical exercise than anything considered as viable weapon research.
People spreading the FUD of U-233 as possible weapon grade material do so out of ignorance or by knowing that such weapons are effectively impossible but don't like nuclear power for one reason or another. The reasons to oppose nuclear power in all it's forms may again be based on ignorance but I'm starting to believe that there are political reasons to oppose it even though it is worthless to produce weapons.
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Ultimately, one has to hope that smart people are too smart, usually, to want to mass-murder their neighbors. Admittedly, history doesn't provide a whole lot of support for this hope,
The other problem is that the "missing pieces" from the puzzle are all basically toy technology. Anybody who can understand basic (and I mean really basic) electronics and follow a howto can build a GPS-guided drone. And since IEDs are a thing, we know that "they" know how to blow stuff up real good. In fact, we gave many of "them" the training. It's very like how we know that Saddam did at one time have WMDs: We kept the receipts.
Personally, I think that if you put a magic button that would destroy the entire world in front of every person on Earth, the button would be pressed almost instantly by millions of people worldwide. It isn't a story that would end well.
This general train of thought, coupled with the one I expressed earlier, is
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"Sir, please come with us. Quietly. We have a robot here."
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More than feasible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's been feasible for quite some years to load a remotely controlled vehicle up with explosives, and drive/fly it into a target.
It IS a problem that flying Drones are being used by criminals, though, to do things such as smuggle drugs into prisons. So remote controlled small vehicles are used for a crime, but those are commodities widely available to everyone.
As far as I know, the use of explosives and complex systems in the commission of a crime are pretty rare, and requires technical
skill and knowl
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They disarmed him? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to sending in the robot with a bomb to kill the suspect?
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Yes, this is not American. I'm pretty sure they violated his Second Amendment rights by disarming rather than killing him.
Re:They disarmed him? (Score:5, Informative)
Police officer fired for not shooting a suspect:
http://www.post-gazette.com/lo... [post-gazette.com]
(not the Onion).
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No, what this means is that every cop is now going to shoot to kill in every situation to save their jobs... Not using a blinker, shoot to kill.
This is an appropriate response.
Re:They disarmed him? (Score:4, Insightful)
This deserves an up-vote; further proof that law enforcement agencies are actively trying to filter out anyone who thinks on the job. They thought an ex-marine would be trigger happy like the rest of them, forgetting that the actual marines need to think on their feet to avoid international incidents.
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He was fired for endangering his colleagues and innocent bystanders. If you risk your own life to make a live arrest of an armed and dangerous perp who's clearly not going to submit, that's your decision, but he could easily have caused the deaths of others. And it wasn't the only offense he was fired for -- this was his third strike.
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My read: He was fired for showing up his colleagues and department.
You know that saying about how B-level managers hire C-level people, because they see A-level people as a threat? It applies to B-level police chiefs as well.
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Not according to the chief who recommended termination or the city manager who actually fired him. They say it had nothing to do with the shooting.
This officer is wrong about one thing. He should find a decent lawyer. In PA you can fire someone without giving a reason but if you fire someone for cause it has to be legal. The city now says the officer was fired for the two earlier incidents, but he was never reprimanded. The letter of termination had two pages detailing what the officer did wrong in the sho
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Only because they took his gun! That's unconstitutional!
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Neither was Tyre King or Tamir Rice, and that didn't stop police from gunning them down. In fact, they didn't even have real guns.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us... [nbcnews.com]
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireS... [go.com]
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You need to add, "...while black".
Remember this guy at the Bundy standoff in Nevada?
http://static1.businessinsider... [businessinsider.com]
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Pulling a BB gun that looks like a handgun and pointing it at police should be expected to result in that action. Would you rather the police instead got shot if it were a real firearm? Do you expect the police to be able to distinguish between a firearm and a BB gun designed to appear as a firearm?
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How about pulling an actual sniper rifle and pointing it at police?
http://static1.businessinsider... [businessinsider.com]
http://cloudfront.mediamatters... [mediamatters.org]
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What does that have to do with the particular incidents you talked about that I responded to?
Pulling a gun on a police officer in a threatening manner often will lead to your death, even if the gun turns out to be a BB gun designed to look like a handgun.
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If you're black, you don't even need to pull a gun. You just need to be black.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/vid... [yahoo.com]
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Because of course, certain isolated incidents are now the normal and indicate that this is what the police are supposed to do?
These incidents happen with white people all the time, but because they aren't black, it doesn't even make more than the local news. Supposedly being a police officer is scary, but maybe if we removed those officers who are proven to do the wrong thing, things will start getting better. However, trying to hold police to some kind of higher standard when the shootings are justified.
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There have been 15 black men killed by police just since Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the anthem a couple of weeks ago. They're not "isolated incidents" any more.
And if "pulling a gun on law enforcement" is what it takes to get shot by police, why is the guy who set up with his sniper rifle and trained it on FBI at the Bundy standoff still walking around without repercussions?
You know your story about the kid with the BB gun getting killed by police? Look what happens
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Or perhaps that is different people acting in different ways and different situations dealt with in different ways.
How many white people have been killed by police? How many of the black people were in the process of committing a crime? How many were justified self defense? You act like every time a black person dies by police, it is all about the police being in the wrong. Do you expect that the police aren't subject to the same justice as a citizen?
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We've seen for certain that police are not subject to the same justice as citizens.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol... [motherjones.com]
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The fact that you point at that as some kind of miscarriage of justice just shows how wrong you are. You do realize that that one was ruled self defense, and that every witness except the kid's friend said that Wilson was defending himself? I suppose when your view is so slanted, even justified self defense looks like murder, but I suppose you think that someone who assaulted a police officer, tried to take his gun, and discharged the firearm within the car somehow was innocent?
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You mention only one of the many cases described in that article. Some police officer were found guilty and still received no punishment.
There are two clear videos of Terrence Crutcher being shot down by police (who all had tazers by the way). From two different angles,
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What happened to sending in the robot with a bomb to kill the suspect?
That's step 2 of this plan for "confrontation with civilians".
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He was a white guy. If he'd been black, they would have nuked him from space.
Re: Nuked from space (Score:1)
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If you read TFA, in this case the suspect was lying prone on his stomach, with the rifle at his feet. The police distracted him by yelling at him over megaphon
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What happened to sending in the robot with a bomb to kill the suspect?
That's so last month. Self awareness is just around the corner. Next - skynet.
Cyberdyne Shares (Score:2)
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No, it's really not obligatory. It's old and tired.
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So are you.
Today's Dilbert (Score:2)
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It's beginning.... (Score:5, Funny)
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The government that governs least governs best. The citizenry that cares the least gets governed worst.
I don't care. I just want an iPhone with the bigger GBs.
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I just want an iPhone with the bigger GBs.
I just want a girlfriend with bigger Bs.
A little sensational? (Score:5, Insightful)
The boring short version: So they noticed the idiot left his gun at his feet while laying flat on his belly in a small dune with a wire fence. The operator extended the arm through the wire fence and yanked it out. With the police up front and a helicopter above, he didn't notice.
I guess ExtendaReach to the rescue? I feel sorry for the operators who don't get any credit. I wonder if those firefighter axes got similar treatment. "Firefighter Ax clears way out of burning building for trapped firefighter and baby."
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I feel sorry for the operators who don't get any credit.
If you had bothered to read the first sentence of the summary you would know that they did get credit.
Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies used a robot to stealthily snatch a rifle from an attempted murder suspect
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Yeah, I was wondering how someone wouldn't notice a robot sneaking up on him, but now I know. What kind of moron puts down his weapon like that? (Answer, a total nutbag, apparently.)
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Maybe he did it deliberately so that he would not get taken out by a sniper if he had been holding the weapon.
From the story it sounds more like he just put it down temporarily while doing something.
Slow down cowboy! Because Slashdot is only for slow people
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http://i.huffpost.com/gen/9849... [huffpost.com]
The next protest movement (Score:1)
Public: "Human lives matter!"
Cops: "Bite my shiny metal ass!"
Yiip Yap (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems every time someone discovers how to do old thing on a new medium and it makes news. Put missiles on a drone, bully someone online, use a new technology to commit a heinous crime? All of these things received widespread news coverage, when they are really nothing more than pencils with erasers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09... [nytimes.com]
In reality these are human nature stories, not technology stories. There is nothing new here, just the combination of things that have already been invented. I want to hear about innovation and invention, not pencil erasers. This is a technology site and should be better than this.
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The pecking order (Score:1)
Of course, they would have sent in the DEPUTY instead of the robot to disarm the suspect. Wouldn't want to risk anyone with seniority...
Not blowed up? (Score:1)
The good news (Score:3)
Fortunately for the suspect, arming a robot isn't a criminal offence or they'd probably charge him for it.
Good News Everybody! (Score:3)
We got a robot that is stealing stuff, we are finally making progress on creating bending units and robot personalities.
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The WHOOSHING sound that you heard is the Planet Express Ship flying over your head.
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Why not Zoidberg?
That's not all it took (Score:5, Funny)
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And his sunglasses. Damn, how could you forget that?
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And, he forgot to say, "Please."
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Sun glasses, dude.
New NRA slogan (Score:2)
You'll get my gun when your robot takes it from me.
Yet Another Robot/Waldo Nuisance Story (Score:2)
Where's Waldo? Everywhere.
Where's the robot? Still trying to climb stairs.
When robots finally do arrive we won't realize that it happened, because the word 'robot' will have been applied to every device out there to which no human is presently attached, but yet is attached through the miracle of radio.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN squinting into a video display with a joystick in his hand... THIS... IS... A... ROBOT!
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IED (Score:1)
Police overreach (Score:2, Funny)
What ever happened to the second amendment! This is just the cops over-reaching and infringing on my constitutional rights again!
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Damn, right! And prisons infringe on my right to assemble! [/snark]
Oh please. I'm likely one of the biggest proponents of the Second Amendment you'll ever hear from and yet I recognize the need for police to disarm those intent on harming others. It's kind of the point of the Second Amendment, isn't it? To be able to stop the other guy before they stop you? Doing so without killing them is always preferred but not always possible.
Or, more succinctly, the US Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Also, I fi
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Holy shit man, I was going for a LOL not a novel!
Brock Ray Bunge is a rather unique name (Score:2)
I'm guessing he started shooting because his construction work wasn't killing enough people [ripoffreport.com].
"Please put down your weapon... (Score:2)
...you have 20 seconds to comply."
I cant decide... (Score:3)
Does this get the Robocop joke? Terminator? Jonny 5? Robot overlord?
Wait....Go-Go Gadget Extendo.......no. Forget it. I'm not funny.
More importantly... (Score:2)
"The robot was a game changer here," said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in the nation. "We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."
More importantly, nobody had to die. They were able to diffuse the situation without filling the guy with bullets, he gets his day in court, and there's no police scandal surrounding his death. This is a win; now, if every other PD would follow suit and use some of their "urban tank" budget on these instead.
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Don't be so sure. Assholes will still argue BS. The robot is racist, or the guy running it is racist, or they have the wrong guy somehow... anything to put BS out there. Anything to try to get away with committing criminal acts.
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Regardless of any claims of racism, or that they got the wrong guy, that may or may not arise, the situation was diffused with nobody having to die. Whether or not a scandal arises from the use of the robot, no scandal will arise from
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Let me be very blunt - sometimes when someone dies, it's not a bad thing. I know this concept is hard, sometimes very foreign to people.
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And back to what I was saying originally. I'm afraid they'll use (be required to use) this instead of taking more decisive action, such as killing the guy while the rest of us are put at risk.
It's really simple and some activist have come to understand this after some police departments have taken then through some training - if they're compliant, no problem. Act like a dumbass, suffer dumbass consequences. I'm kind of for making sure dumbasses suffer dumbass consequences instead of sticking it to the rest
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Are there situations where this robot would not be ideal? Of course there are, quite a number of them; in fact, they're likely the majority. That
Overheard at the encounter (Score:2)
Dead or alive, you're coming with me!
Improved application of robotics (Score:2)
Shotgun not rifle (Score:2)
other tasks (Score:1)
And since DHS wants to control all the voting machines, maybe we can send the robots to help that get going and stop people from voting for opposition candidates.
And since the IRS is charging taxes based on political views, maybe we could send robots out to vote on behalf of other people or take the guns away from people who don't have th