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New York Returns Its Police 'Robodog' After a Public Outcry (wired.com) 102

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The New York Police Department said this week that it will stop using the "Digidog," a four-legged robot occasionally deployed for recon in dangerous situations. NYPD officials confirmed in a statement it had terminated its contract and will return the dog to vendor Boston Dynamics. Last December, the agency leased the Digidog, nicknamed Spot, for $94,000. From a report: John Miller, the police department's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the contract was "a casualty of politics, bad information, and cheap sound bites." Miller bemoaned the role of bad press in the backlash, but in many ways the NYPD's own actions were a blueprint for how not to introduce new tech. And, for activists, how to effectively agitate for banning unwanted technologies.

In truth, it wasn't just sound bites that doomed Spot. New Yorkers didn't want it. In February, the NYPD used Spot to defuse a hostage situation in the Bronx. When video of the device went viral, its flexible legs and camera-for-a-head design spooked people. The robot is quadrupedal but doesn't actually look like a dog. A more immediate comparison is the armed robots featured in a postapocalyptic episode of Black Mirror. This comparison spread rapidly on social media. The NYPD's secrecy worked against it: There was no public comment process for Spot, and residents hadn't known to expect to see robot-dogs respond to hostage situations. The NYPD had exactly this opportunity, months earlier, when it had to disclose both the price and governing policies for all surveillance devices as defined by the city's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. Instead, the agency included a passing reference to Spot in a larger section on "situational awareness cameras," with no images.
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New York Returns Its Police 'Robodog' After a Public Outcry More

New York Returns Its Police 'Robodog' After a Public Outcry

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  • The NYPD's secrecy worked against it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @02:09PM (#61332848) Journal

    I would hope so!

    We allow far too much secrecy in our public institutions.

    This is what fuels and sustains all those conspiracy theories out there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by robi5 ( 1261542 )

      That, and stupidity. Well, mostly stupidity and ignorance. Not some very small vehicle with a camera attached. What, maybe it records some crime?

      • Re:The NYPD's secrecy worked against it. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @02:34PM (#61332968)

        Well, people saw bad things on TV and are unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Also, they like to imagine themselves prognosticators of dystopian futures on twitter. "I know, I'll post a picture of a killer robot next to this robot, that will prove how forward thinking I am!".

        Fucking "activists", lol. The problem with that term is it can apply to someone who works to prevent women from being murdered or black people being shot with no accountability, or it can apply to someone who's upset that doctors use the term "obesity" or that thin women buy clothes for fat people and resize them, or that a person who performs better in a job gets paid more than someone who doesn't perform as well.

        In this case, an "activist" is someone who has seen a lot of TV/movies with bad robots in dystopian futures.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The objection was not irrational fear, it was that this is just another example of the cops spending money on expensive toys, which encourages them to look for excuses to use them. Remember all that "defund the police" stuff? This is the kind of thing they were talking about, that $90k could have been better spent providing useful services that reduce crime before it happens.

          The other issue is that because they kept is semi-secret it might have scared the shit out of someone with mental health problems, and

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Cylix ( 55374 )

          So basically, you are advocating for the people because they are essentially retarded and unable to formulate their own opinions based on fact finding.

          Sounds about right for New Yorkers.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Jastiv ( 958017 )
          Yeah, they could just put the robot dog in a police car, and then you can't even see it, so you don't even know it is a robot, it is only when it comes out then you know what it actually is. I think people realize we are really not that far away from all robotic cops. That is what happened to me, I actually thought all the cops were robots and it scared the hell out of me. So in hell world, we are all robots running proprietary software on hardware controlled by the government, but we are the spirits of
        • They should have named the robot DynoMutt.
      • In this case it helped to end a hostage situation and kept some police officers out of harms ways. Instead, now police officers could be in a potential kill or be killed situation, and the public will protest when the officer decided not to sacrifice himself in this instance. This tech was a good application and the ignorant public was wrong to get rid of it. It could have served to deescalate these situations, and should have.

      • Re:The NYPD's secrecy worked against it. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @02:36PM (#61332984)

        Unfortunately, the police don't have a very deep reserve of goodwill at the moment. If they did, they could push back a bit more against public opinion, or work on improving this robot's image with a PR campaign.

        Having a remote robotic vehicle to investigate dangerous situations seems like it would make everyone safer. Officers would be less likely to be injured or killed, and civilians wouldn't be injured or killed by officers with a nervous trigger finger, mistaking a phone for a gun, etc.

        • Unfortunately, the police don't have a very deep reserve of goodwill at the moment. If they did, they could push back a bit more against public opinion, or work on improving this robot's image with a PR campaign.

          What are you talking about? They're very generous as public servants [reddit.com].

          Having a remote robotic vehicle to investigate dangerous situations seems like it would make everyone safer. Officers would be less likely to be injured or killed, and civilians wouldn't be injured or killed by officers with a nervous trigger finger, mistaking a phone for a gun, etc.

          Truly, dig[i]dogs [youtu.be] have come a very long way.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by lsllll ( 830002 )

          Having a remote robotic vehicle to investigate dangerous situations seems like it would make everyone safer. Officers would be less likely to be injured or killed, and civilians wouldn't be injured or killed by officers with a nervous trigger finger, mistaking a phone for a gun, etc.

          This. I don't see any rationale for not continuing to use the dog. People can get over their preconceived notions and image scars from watching TVs and movies.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Having a remote robotic vehicle to investigate dangerous situations seems like it would make everyone safer.

          That's the argument they will use for arming the robots. It will allow the cops to make a calm, careful decision about who to shoot using the grainy video feed, instead of risking their own lives.

          • You seem awfully cavalier about putting cops lives at risk. It's a goddamn dangerous job that no one wants to do anymore, and if conditions for police get much worse, there won't be any alternative but robots. We'll have drone pilots doing the patrolling from a secure location, maybe supplemented with some AI decision making, and won't that be grand? The future is almost guaranteed to be dystopian now, because leftists are such dedicated assholes.
        • But do they really need to spend $90,000 on a one year lease?

    • Yes cops have dangerous jobs, but their attempt to make the individual cop safe (from injury and litigation) as made being a police an even more dangerous job.
      The police of old, who use to walk the streets, talk and get to know the locals, Correct bad behavior without having to arrest everyone, or give them a ticket. Vs now they are in their car, separated from the community, only show up when things get bad, and need to fill out a quota to have so many tickets, as fines are a wonderful way to offset low

      • The community's now 8E6 people. Seems like you'd need these robots walking beats, interrogating^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hacting with the community, centrally collecting their information and understanding, and using that to improve skynet^H^H^H^H^H^Henlightened public policy relevant to the current state of life in the entire city. You know, so they can eventually kill all humans. I mean *maim* all humans.

      • Yes cops have dangerous jobs, but their attempt to make the individual cop safe (from injury and litigation) as made being a police an even more dangerous job.

        Not really. Why? Because the police already have had robots for years [roboticstomorrow.com]. Hostage situation is another appropriate place for them for surveillance for example.

      • Re:The NYPD's secrecy worked against it. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @04:39PM (#61333462)

        >Yes cops have dangerous jobs

        Not especially. They're something like the 30th most dangerous job in the country, with far lower risk of dying on the job than roofers, delivery drivers, or assembly line overseers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The police have really screwed the pooch in that they have such a history of taking anything neutral and potentially good and making it racial and negative. Stop and frisk, though fundamentally flawed, became untenable when the police pretty much used it to harass black people in white spaces. This robot dog is an incredible device, and should be in every cop shop, but is the population going to trust it not to be misused. Evidently not

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Baleet ( 4705757 )

      This is what fuels and sustains all those conspiracy theories out there.

      I disagree. If you've ever been in a leadership position in an organization, you know that you cannot tell everyone everything. That is why we have NDAs. No, it's living in a complex world with many sources of varying quality providing conflicting information. Take humans of varying intelligence, all of whom have a need to make sense of the world they live in, and who have a tendency to "fill in the blanks" and find patterns in the stimuli they receive, and you wind up with plenty of interpretations of that

    • they should have gotten the aibo robot dog instead

    • No mod points and I already posted.

  • It's quite optimistic to expect the NYPD to admit that they had a part in the failed rollout.

    It is far easier to blame politics, blame reporters, blame social media, blame anybody else. Accepting responsibility for one's failures is sometimes hard to do, and police officers are often trained that admitting mistakes is a sign of weakness. Cops even take statements like "I'm sorry they got hurt" as an admission of guilt rather than a statement of sympathy.

    At best I can imagine some retrospective statements

    • If the media doesn't expose our problems, then people wouldn't have a problem with our problems.

      It was an interesting idea, I am glad they tried it out, but it didn't work... Move on. Don't try to double down on a failure, or try to redirect the blame somewhere else.

      We cannot move forward if we don't try, but when we try there is a chance of failure, when there is a failure, you need to do something different to avoid it again.

      A robot to come in and talk to the hostage takers seemed like a good idea, tha

      • Yes, but none of that makes any sense. That's not why it's being stopped - there are plenty of other use cases for this besides the rare chance to send it in to talk to hostage takers. It was stopped because of irrational people overly exposed to entertainment media who can't differentiate reality from fiction.

        I guess if you want to expand your theory you could say that indeed NYPD did overestimate the rationality and intelligence of the people in the media and on twitter.

        Hilariously, now instead they will

        • No, it was stopped because cops have established a long and colorful history of egregiously abusing every tool they've been given, and resisting any accountability for that abuse. Up to and including lying under oath on a semi-regular basis.

          And so people react to any new and potentially dangerous trend with fully justified distrust. And don't think for a moment that weaponizing such robots (both with weapons and surveillance) isn't at the top of a whole lot of people's to-do list. Boston Dynamics tries t

      • But a robot that looks like a gun from a sci-fi movie

        It should look more like Scary Robot [duckduckgo.com].

  • Black Mirror should be banned, as it tends to draw a realistic picture of our own technological future, and that scares people.

  • So far robots have only gone crazy in movies. In real-life robots have NEVER gone crazy, meanwhile, humans go crazy all the time. Can't believe that idiots who believe movies are real are making decisions that will cost lives. Sci-fi has failed humanity in the last few decades as it has become extreme dystopian.

    Fiction is meant to entertain. To educate is a secondary goal. They have to give you something you can't get in real life or nobody will buy tickets.

    • the problem is police militarization.

      Giving them these kind of toys encourages them to use them. That in turn encourages them to create dangerous situations.

      That's why Waco was such a disaster. They could have arrested David Koresh during his morning jog, but they wanted a cool photo op with their cool toys.

      The robot dog is just like that. They'll want to show him off, so they'll set up a siege situation they can send the dog into, and eventually one of them will blow up in their faces Waco styl

      • Alright. Show us on the robot dog where it touched you. You'll note it was for "recon", not storming the Bastille. Encouraging them to use them in dangerous situations is exactly the thing we want to encourage, and if we're lucky the occasional police shooting will be caught on a camera.

    • Robots flip their shit all the time which is why most of them are in cages

    • So far robots have only gone crazy in movies. In real-life robots have NEVER gone crazy, meanwhile, humans go crazy all the time.

      Back when I was in college, working in a robotics lab, my professor/advisor was having another talk with everyone about lab and robot safety. He told us about the time he was working with a robotic arm he was programming tasks on, and he walked into its work space while wanting to do whatever small change to stuff piled there, I can’t remember anymore, and the arm had some kind of error and because it had very high torque joints for fast motion, insta cracked him across the head and knocked him out.

      • Crazy implies a sentient mind. Robots are as sapient as a toaster.

        • Merrim-Webster

          : not mentally sound : marked by thought or action that lacks reason : INSANE sense 1b yelling like a crazy man —not used technically

          marked by action that lacks reason fits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      Robots don't go crazy, people with robots go crazy. For example, when the police in Dallas used a robot to deliver a bomb [npr.org]. Blew him up real good!

      I'm not saying that the subject they blew up wasn't a problem nor even that death was a surprising or unwarranted end for someone who gets into a multi-hour standoff after killing 5 cops, but nevertheless the image of death delivered by robot isn't very comfortable for citizens.

    • Clearly you haven't met my Roomba...
  • Were people upset that they aren't endangering real people or animals to enter dangerous situations or something?

    • People were upset with robots that are primarily going to be used to bust people for having a joint or jaywalking.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I am skeptical that it is as much about using robots to bust people for such things as much as an indication that people are probably upset that laws prohibiting those things might be able to be more rigidly enforced in the future simply using such tools.
    • Waste of money?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        How is it a waste of money if it gets used?

        • How is it a waste of money if it gets used?

          In the bad ROI sense.

          • A single accidental death by a cop can regularly costs taxpayers 5 to 10 million dollars. The George Floyd Protests were attributed to 1 to 2 billion dollars of property damage nationwide.

            There are approximately 1000 deaths by US police officers each year. Many are justified, but every time a cop kills a person, society is rolling a dice and on average we lose over a million dollars. Same thing happens the other way around from cops getting hurt in the line of duty and that's an average of 200 fatalities in

            • A single accidental death by a cop can regularly costs taxpayers 5 to 10 million dollars. The George Floyd Protests were attributed to 1 to 2 billion dollars of property damage nationwide.

              There are approximately 1000 deaths by US police officers each year. Many are justified, but every time a cop kills a person, society is rolling a dice and on average we lose over a million dollars. Same thing happens the other way around from cops getting hurt in the line of duty and that's an average of 200 fatalities in that direction along with 17k injuries which incur other significant payouts to the families in addition to medical expenses.

              If a robotic costs 100k and can help defuse situations rather than escalating them then saving 1 life would easily justify the costs of 10 robots. If you avoid an officer being assaulted or shot and spending a week in the hospital, that can justify about 1 robot.

              Or perhaps the robot dog with the creepy camera neck trots up and the hostage gets shot. Oops.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by mark-t ( 151149 )
                The same thing could happen if a human went in instead of a robot. Worse, both could get shot.

                • The same thing could happen if a human went in instead of a robot. Worse, both could get shot.

                  How is a robot dog going to be better at stopping an armed aggressor than an armed officer?

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by mark-t ( 151149 )
                    In the sense that it can make it safer to gather initial information on what may be required to stop them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          If I use a Ferarri as my daily driver, it gets used, but I could have gotten the same practical benefit from a Toyota for a lot cheaper.

    • Yes! Thank you!

      I was happy to see the introduction of the robot dog. And it's goddamned bloody awful that they gave in to the luddite mob and withdrew it from service. Just imagine... I've no idea of the numbers... how many real dogs in the world have been cruelly abused by the police by being trained to be vicious and then put in harms way. These robot dogs, if they'd kept going and eventually rolled them out everywhere, could have stopped all that. But because of this tech-phobic fuckery; thousands o

  • John Miller, the police department's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the contract was "a casualty of politics, bad information, and cheap sound bites."
    Gee... and maybe the $94,000 so well-spent?

  • A person's life doesn't matter, what matters to fools is what or who kills the person. Can someone make money off it? Can someone use it for political advantage? That's what matters. I mean look at the number of violent crimes and homicides that nobody cares about.

  • Drones will be used against you. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @02:40PM (#61333002) Homepage Journal

    Drones are no longer so expensive as to only be available to the military, now they're cheap enough to be used in bulk on citizens. And just because the government doesn't know even how many laws there are, doesn't mean you don't have to follow each and every one of them, especially if you have annoyed anyone in authority.

  • Impossible! Who couldn't love Robopuppy [youtu.be]?

  • However I think this is short sighted. I could theorize many scenarios where a robot could be used in an active shooter or hostage situation to bring the situation to an end quicker and, or risking less lives. I remember Columbine Police Officers being criticized for not entering the high school to take on the active shooters. A robot could give flexibility to at least disable or slow down violent criminals without putting more lives at risk. I am a member of a minority group in the USA and I have no qualms

  • You want robots in the Police (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vix86 ( 592763 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @03:03PM (#61333102)

    I'm serious. I've seen so many videos of police interactions where people end up dead. Sometimes its easy to excuse -- "The dude pulled a gun on the cop" or "He charged him with a knife" -- but other times it makes no sense and it leads to great outrage. It has turned interacting with the police into something similar to interacting with a dog's food bowl and having to be careful to not freak the dog out or you might get bit (ie: shot). This, to me, signals that we have a lot of cops on the force that are -- to put it frankly -- cowards, or scared shitless, when interacting with people in less than ideal situations.

    The way I see it, if you can't avoid having cowards on the force, then you simply need to find ways to remove them from the equation. Robots are the answer. If the cop doesn't have to fear for their life (either in actuality or in their imagination), then fewer people will end up dead when they come into contact with the cops.

    I know people are too busy dreaming up Black Mirror or crazy Dystopian futures with robots, where the tech is abused, but with the combination of social media stoking outrage and the current state of police accountability. Are we not already pretty much there with current police? As far as I can tell, robots can only move us away from a worse future.

    Consider that a robot can always have its cameras recording, it doesn't need "privacy time." And whenever its deployed, it's likely in a scenario where its important to have a video and audio record for the event. Finally, you can kit robots up with a wide range of less-lethal options and don't have the same broken mental math that goes on with cops -- robots aren't alive.

    You want robots mixed in with the police.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      These robots wouldn't help much with the police killing people. Most of the time the people they kill are running away or complying. These robots are not fast enough to chase a running human and couldn't do much to them if they caught them.

      Most of the shootings are people fleeing, people involved in a fight with someone else (so the shooting is to protect the other person), or after the person has surrendered (e.g. George Floyd and similar excessive restraint cases).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vix86 ( 592763 )

        I'll agree, most current robots aren't there yet for catching people. But Handle, the bot that BD seems to have discontinued at this point, was probably the bot that jumped out at me the most and made me consider a future with robots in Law enforcement. Bipedal wheeled bots that might weigh similar to a small woman. Handle could get up to 30-35MPH if I recall right.

        As for what they could do if they catch them? Bolo tie their arms and legs? Hit them with a high power taser? A robot could theoretically carry

    • Dystopian futures with robots, where the tech is abused, but with the combination of social media stoking outrage and the current state of police accountability. Are we not already pretty much there with current police? As far as I can tell, robots can only move us away from a worse future.

      Other countries, even those with guns, don’t have the police issues we Americans do. So it’s already shown to be really about the responsibility and accountability of our police which obviously needs some rethinking. Robots are just a force multiplier, able to remove a human or animal from a task, not good or bad. With big robots come big responsibility and it’s a legitimate concern that without improvement on the human side of things, they are just going to make the problem worse.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      Can’t agree with you there.
      The human element is what makes policing work. For example British police mostly don’t carry guns and use psychological methods to enforce law, something a robot without a soul that can’t empathise will never accomplish.
      The USA is a country built on individualism causing mistrust that puts its citizens in a Cold War with each other. Arming yourself to the teeth, and violence is a byproduct of that culture which invades your policing tactics and police force attit

    • It has turned interacting with the police into something similar to interacting with a dog's food bowl and having to be careful to not freak the dog out or you might get bit

      That's by far the best analogy I've seen to describe the behaviour of (some) police officers. Especially since - like with a dog - a lot of that behaviour comes from poor training and bad handling (instructions & policy). Though I am not so sure about replacing cops with robots. While cops will follow bad instructions to a degree (especially if it becomes an ingrained culture), a human cop might well balk at following instructions like: "Go beat those peaceful protesters to a bloody pulp*. A robot w

    • Yup. Couldn't agree more about the need for robots. But you sort of miss the root cause. Nobody seems to get it. Or the people who do are avoiding telling the truth.

      In America, we are SWIMMING in guns. More than one per person. So, whenever you interact with a cop, that cop is assuming that you're caryring a gun. No, not just one gun. The cop is assuming you're carrying TWO guns. Pro gun nuts will come in with convoluted, sophist statistics to support the idea that the US is a peaceful utopia BECAUSE

    • There are many mechanisms in place to help the police. Starting with "non lethal" weapons, bodycams, pepper spray, hand to hand combat lessons etc., up to automatic weapons, body armor, armored vehicles and tanks.

      Yet over time they somehow don't translate into less cowards, but into more; not fewer people dying unnecessarily, but more; not more accountability, but less.

      The others are right: police needs to become trustworthy again. Them being cowards when they shouldn't has nothing to do with opportunity an

    • For anyone wondering about the Black Mirror reference, the episode you want is "Metalhead", in which very Boston-Dynamics-like robot dogs turn on humans.

  • Maybe it reminds *you* of Black Mirror. When I see pictures of Digidog, the first thing I think of is The Hound from Fahrenheit 451.

    Let's face it, if you've read (or watched) ANY science fiction in the last 70 years or so, robot dogs are going to make you very nervous.

    • First thought upon reading the headline was how long the summary could go without mentioning "armed robots featured in a postapocalyptic"...

      They should know by now, that's now how you Orwell! This is how you Orwell. [youtube.com]

  • Too Bad (Score:3)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Friday April 30, 2021 @06:10PM (#61333740) Journal
    It could have been a very useful tool. Why put humans' lives at risk when you don't have to. And fuck the criminals.
  • Just when you think people can't get more ignorant and stupid. I would much prefer a robot knocking down my door in a raid or when investigating what they consider high risk situations, a robot isn't going to make juidgement calls based on fear, surprise or racist assessments. the situations this was being used in is exactly where you want unemotional assessments in the face of danger and not a human that has honest fears for their own safety or is simply a trigger happy ahole. Hollywood combined with ignor

  • I think we all know that it was a useless bit of junk.

    If it didn't literally have an armed escort every time it went for a "walk" it would have been beaten to pieces and sold for scrap. I'd give it ten minutes tops.

  • The police have squandered their trust and credibility. They lie constantly, routinely escalate routine situations into deadly force encounters, commit cold-blooded murder in full view of umpteen dozen cell phone cameras, all with absolute impunity. Many of them are ex-combat vets with obvious PTSD issues (shooting kids will do that to you, but I digress) and abuse of anabolic steroids is rampant. And then they can't figure out why people are afraid and mistrustful of them.

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