Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled two new police robots and a tracking device that he announced the department will be purchasing and leasing to keep people in the city safe at a press conference in Times Square on Tuesday.
The planned purchasing and leasing of the high-tech safety devices comes just one week after Adams ordered agencies to reduce their budgets by 4% for the upcoming fiscal year, beginning July 1, according to Politico. The innovations are called K5, StarChase and Digidog and “this is the beginning of a series of rollouts,” Adams said at the press conference. (RELATED: NYC Mayor Eric Adams Calls For Shoppers To Stop Wearing Masks)
In February 2023, overall crime in NYC fell by 5.6% when compared to February 2022, according to the New York Police Department. However, felony assault and grand larceny auto rose in this same period.
The K5 autonomous security robot is egg-shaped and “uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time incident notifications to first responders” and has been used by law enforcement agencies in areas such as college campuses and shopping malls, according to Chief of Patrol Jeffrey Maddrey at the press conference. The New York Police Department (NYPD) is leasing one of them and it will be deployed with a human partner inside the Times Square subway station in June or July as part of a six-month pilot program.
This photograph shows Boston Dynamics’ SPOT robot dog on the opening day of the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona on February 28, 2022. – The world’s biggest mobile fair is held from February 28 to March 3, 2022. (Photo by PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images)
StarChase is a handheld or vehicle-mounted device that discharges a GPS-enabled projectile at a car in order to track it, according to officials. It is designed to help police officers avoid dangerous chases and its pilot program will last 90 days.
Digidog is dog-shaped and “will be able to enter, assess, assist NYPD in tracking and investigating high-risk hazardous situations and locations” and it will save police and public lives, according to Maddrey. The NYPD will be acquiring two of these robots for $750,000 and they will be remote-controlled and work with the NYPD’s Technical Assistance & Response Unit.
“Spending mass amounts of money on new policing toys for the NYPD is not a serious response to public safety concerns,” tweeted NYCLU, New York State’s affiliate to the American Civil Liberties Union. “We should be investing in more housing, better schools, and increased jobs—not invasive surveillance technology for law enforcement.”
Nearly two years ago, the NYPD terminated its use of Digidog early following public backlash that it was a dystopian example of brutal policing, according to The New York Times. Similarly, civil liberties advocates in San Francisco objected to deadly robot police there, saying they could cause increased police aggression, particularly with impoverished and nonwhite communities, according to The Associated Press.
“Digidog is out of the pound,” Adams declared in Tuesday’s press conference.
“The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, in a statement on Tuesday. “New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff ‘RoboCop.’”
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