Controversy in Oakland over the use of 'Terminator'-style police

Terminator, Robocop... The Oakland Police Department opened the debate on the use of armed machines with the ability to kill. OPD officials discussed implementing such robots in the California city but ultimately withdrew the proposal after the uproar generated when this was made public.

The OPD published confirmation on its social networks that it would not be using these "remote vehicles," assuring that, after internal discussions, "the department decided it no longer wanted to explore that particular option."

"When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

According to The Intercept, the initiative was met with criticism and fear from a civilian oversight body. During the discussions, Police Lt. Omar Daza-Quiroz outlined the hypothetical circumstances under which the police saw it fit to use these tools: "I mean, is it possible we have an active shooter in a place we can’t get to? And he’s fortified inside a house? Or we’re trying to get to a person —."

This didn't seem to convince his critics. For Jennifer Tu, a member of the American Friends Service Committee and the Oakland Police Commission's subcommittee on militarized policing, "Anytime anyone has a tool, they’re going to use it more. You have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the more that police, in general, have military equipment, have more weapons, those weapons get used.."

Lethal violence at the "push of a button"

Also Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that this could cause an escalation of lethal violence. "It in many ways lowers the psychological hurdle for enacting that violence when it’s just a button on a remote control," he expounded. Tu is not convinced that it is police themselves who are responsible to determine what are "certain catastrophic, high-risk, high-threat, mass-casualty events" - as the police proposal read - which justify "such a robot to be deployed when officers simply want to be lethal."

Guariglia's reference to "pushing a button" is not a metaphor. It's because the model the department was considering was the Northrop Grumman Remotec Andros Mark 5-A1 robot, one used by bomb squad members to detonate explosive objects - a far less romantic image than science fiction fans might have in their heads. Oakland Police experiments are incorporating a "non-electric, percussion-driven disruptor" into which they have introduced blanks, but which, Daza-Quiroz acknowledged, could fire 12-gauge shotgun rounds.

Texas precedent

The use of killer robots, as critics call them, by police already has a precedent in the US. In 2016, five officers were killed by a sniper in Dallas during protests over the deaths of two African Americans shot by officers. Unable to take down the shooter, the police strapped a C4 explosive package on a bomb disposal robot and detonated it next to the killer.