RoboCop: Oakland Police Consider Arming Robots With Shotguns

IT SOON BECAME clear the Oakland Police Department was saying what nearly every security agency says when it asks the public to trust it with an alarming new power: We’ll only use it in emergencies — but we get to decide what’s an emergency.

The question of whether robots originally designed for defusing bombs should be converted into remote-controlled guns taps into several topics at the center of national debates: police using lethal force, the militarization of American life, and, not least of all, killer robots. Critics of the armed robo-cops note that the idea of Predator drones watching American racial justice protests may have seemed similarly far-fetched in the years before it started happening. “It’s not that we don’t want to debate how to use these tools safely,” said Liz O’Sullivan, CEO of the AI bias-auditing startup Parity and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. “It’s a question of, if we use them at all, what’s the impact going to be to democracy?”

Some observers say the Oakland police’s robot plan contradicts itself. “It’s billed as a de-escalation facilitator, but they want to keep it open as a potential lethal weapon,” Jaime Omar Yassin, an independent journalist in Oakland who has documented the commission meetings, tweeted. As with any high-tech toy, the temptation to use advanced technology may surpass whatever institutional guardrails the police have in place. Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “The ease of use of weapons as well as the dangerous legal precedence justifying the casual use of weapons makes police less likely to attempt to deescalate situations.”

Tu hopes that by cracking down on shotgun robots before they come to be, Oakland and cities across the country can avoid debates about limits on police powers that only come after those powers are abused. She pointed to the Oakland police ban on using firehoses, a bitter reminder of abuses in American policing from the not-too-distant past. “We have an opportunity right now to prevent the lawsuit that will force the policy to be rewritten,” Tu said. “We have an opportunity to prevent the situation, the harm, the trauma that would occur in order for a lawsuit to need to be initiated.”

Skeptics of robo-policing, including Tu, say these debates need to happen today to preempt the abuses of tomorrow, especially because of the literal and figurative distance robotic killing affords. Guariglia said, “It in many ways lowers the psychological hurdle for enacting that violence when it’s just a button on a remote control.”

AS THE OAKLAND commission hearing went on, Daza-Quiroz invoked a controversial 2016 incident in Dallas. Police had strapped a C-4 bomb to a city-owned robot and used it to blow up a sniper who’d killed five police officers during a downtown rally. It is widely considered to be the country’s first instance of robotic police killing. While police generally heralded the ingenuity of the response, others criticized it as summary execution by robot. In an email to The Intercept, Daza-Quiroz said the department imagines weaponizing the PAN disruptor on the department’s $280,000 Northrop Grumman Remotec Andros Mark 5-A1 robot — the very same model used so controversially in Dallas.

Daza-Quiroz noted that the department had never actually attempted to load a live round into the PAN gun for fear of breaking the $3,000 attachment. Yet when Tu asked whether the commission could add policy language that would prohibit arming the robot with lethal 12-gauge shotgun rounds, the department’s vision for robotic policing became clearer. “I don’t want to add a prohibited use,” Daza-Quiroz replied, “because what if we need it for some situation later on?”

Daza-Quiroz explained that a hypothetical lethally armed robot would still be subject to the department’s use of force policy. Oakland Police Department Lt. Joseph Turner, stressing the need to keep extreme options on the table for extreme circumstances, urged the commission to allow such a killer robot in case of “exigencies.” He said, “I’m sure those officers that day in Texas did not anticipate that they were going to deliver a bomb using a robot.”

The Oakland Police Department’s assurances that a shotgun-toting robot would be subject to departmental use-of-force policy did not seem to satisfy critics. Nor did the messenger have a record that inspires confidence. A 2013 East Bay Express report on Daza-Quiroz and another officer’s killing of an unarmed Oakland man found that he had been the subject of over 70 excessive force complaints. (One lawsuit prompted a six-figure settlement from the city and the jury ruled for the officers in another; the officers were never charged with a crime, and an arbitrator overturned the police chief’s decision to discipline the officers. Police spokesperson Candace Keas declined to comment on the dozens of excessive force complaints.)

In the wake of the shooting, which prompted protests, the East Bay Times reported that Daza-Quiroz was asked by an internal investigator why he hadn’t used his Taser instead. He responded, “I wanted to get lethal.”

The concern is, then, less that police would use a shotgun robot in “certain catastrophic, high-risk, high-threat, mass casualty events” — as the tentative policy language favored by the department currently reads — but that such a robot would be rolled out when the police simply want to get lethal. The vagaries of what precisely constitutes a “high-risk” event or who determines the meaning of “high threat” affords the police too much latitude, Tu told The Intercept in an interview. “It’s not a technical term, there’s no definition of it,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” When asked by email for precise definitions of these terms, Daza-Quiroz said, “High risk, high threat incidents can vary in scope and nature and are among the more challenging aspects of law enforcement.”

Critics say such ambiguous language means Oakland police would get to use a robot to kill someone whenever they decide they need a robot to kill someone. The policy has analogues in more routine police work: After shooting unarmed people, officers frequently offer post-hoc justifications that they felt their life was in danger.

“Anytime anyone has a tool, they’re going to use it more,” said Tu. “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.”

AFTER WEEKS OF wrangling, both the commission and the police department agreed on language that will prohibit any offensive use of robots against people, with an exception for delivering pepper spray. The agreement will go for review by the city council on October 18.

Tu suspects the sudden compromise on the killer-robot policy is explained not by any change of heart, but rather by the simple fact that had the debate continued any longer, the department would have missed the deadline for submitting a policy — and risked losing the ability to legally operate its robots altogether.

There is nothing preventing the Oakland Police Department from, as Daza-Quiroz said they will, continuing to push for legally sanctioned killing using a PAN disruptor. No matter how the Oakland policy shakes out in the long term, the issue of robotic policing is likely to remain. “I’m sure Dallas [police] weren’t the only ones who had considered lethal force with their robot before doing so, and Oakland police aren’t the only ones who are thinking about it even more now,” Tu told The Intercept. “They’re just the only ones who thought about it out loud with a committee.”

According to Daza-Quiroz, the department is still looking toward the future. “We will not be arming robots with lethal rounds anytime soon, and if, and when that time comes each event will be assessed prior to such deployment,” he said. When asked if there were other situations beyond a Dallas-style sniper in which police might wish to kill with a robot, Daza-Quiroz added: “Absolutely there are many more scenarios.”

With thousands of Andros robots operated by hundreds of police department across the country, those concerned by the prospect of shotgun robots on the streets of Oakland or elsewhere refer to what they say is a clear antecedent with other militarized hardware: mission creep.

Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics of the PAN disruptor proposal say the Oakland police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech, as happened frequently during the George Floyd protests.

“As you do this work for a few years, you come to realize that we’re not really talking about a slippery slope. It’s more like a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization,” said O’Sullivan, of Parity. There’s no reason to think the PAN disruptor will be any different: “One can imagine applications of this particular tool that may seem reasonable, but with a very few modifications, or even just different kinds of ammunition, these tools can easily be weaponized against democratic dissent.”