Dystopian 'Digidog'- Robo-Dog Now Patrols New York City, The Last Thing We Need
A dystopian robo-dog now patrols NY City. That's the last thing we need.' Akin Olla, The Guardian, March 2, 2021. Drone warfare abroad is bad enough. Let’s not apply the same kinds of technologies to domestic policing. - Ed.
The New York police department has acquired a robotic police dog, known as Digidog, and has deployed it on the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and, most recently, the Bronx. At a time that activists in New York, and beyond, are calling for the defunding of police departments – for the sake of funding more vital services that address the root causes of crime and poverty – the NYPD’s decision to pour money into a robot dog seems tone-deaf if not an outright provocation.
As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, put it on Twitter: “Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead. Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with underresourced schools.” Law enforcement in the United States is already biased and grounded in a history of systemic racism. Many police departments in the US evolved from slave-catching units or union-busting militias, and their use today to disproportionately capture and imprison Black people drips of those origins.
And it isn’t just the institutions themselves that perpetuate racism; individual police officers are also biased and more likely to view Black people as threats. Even Black police officers share these biases and often replicate the harm of their white counterparts.. Any new technological development will only give police departments new tools to further surveil, and potentially to arrest or kill, Black and Muslim people. While Boston Dynamics, the creators of the robot dog, have insisted that Digidog will never be used as a weapon, it is highly unlikely that that will remain true. MSCHF, a political art collective, has already shown how easy it is to weaponize the dog.
In February they mounted a paintball gun on its back and used it to fire upon a series of art pieces in a gallery. The future of weaponized robot policing has already been paved by the Dallas police department. In 2016, the DPD used a robot armed with a bomb to kill Micah Johnson, an army reservist who served in Afghanistan, after he killed five police officers in what he said was retaliation for the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/02/nypd-police-robodog-patrols
https://news.yahoo.com/digidog-robotic-dog-used-police-153453166.html
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They've come a long way from this!
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