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Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing (vice.com)
A police standoff with a suspect in the killing of five police officers in Dallas came to an abrupt end on Friday morning in an unusual way. The police said that negotiations broke down, an exchange of gunfire happened, but then they had no option but to use "bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was." Motherboard explains the unprecedented shift in policing. From an article: Peter W. Singer, an expert in military technology and robot warfare at the New America Foundation, tweeted that this is the first known incident of a domestic police force using a robot to kill a suspect. Singer tweeted that in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers have strapped claymore mines to the $8,000 MARCbot using duct tape to turn them into jury-rigged killing devices. Singer says all indications are that the Dallas Police Department did something similar in this case -- it improvised to turn a surveillance robot into a killing machine. Improvised device or not, the concerns here mirror a debate that's been going on for a few years now: Should law enforcement have access to armed drones, or, for that matter, weaponized robots? In 2013 Kentucky Senator Rand Paul staged a 13-hour filibuster that was focused entirely on concerns about the use of armed drones on US soil. Last year, North Dakota became the first state to legalize nonlethal, weaponized drones for its police officers. [...] The ability for police to remotely kill suspects raises due process concerns. If a shooter is holed up and alone, can they be qualified as an imminent threat to life? Are there clear protocols about when a robot can be used to engage a suspect versus when a human needs to engage him or her? When can the use of lethal force be administered remotely?
Just be careful - robotics are becoming easier to use / knowledge on these is becoming more widespread. The more they are used in this fashion, the more people will think to do it. It won't be just police. It is just a tool, but as a society, we should definitely do our best to stay away from using killing force simply because it's the easy option. They may not have had a better choice in this case, but this will be a recurring issue.
http://philly.curbed.com/2013/5/13/10244298/how-philadelphia-became-the-city-that-bombed-itself
"It has been 28 years since police lieutenant Frank Powell leaned from a helicopter and tossed a gym bag packed with C-4 and Tovex explosives onto a residential rowhome in West Philadelphia, leading to the deaths of six adults and five children, along with the complete destruction of 61 homes.
On May 13, 1985 at about 5:30 PM, Philadelphia gained the immortal moniker of "The City That Bombed Itself"; a brutal ending to the city's longstanding struggle with an organization that called itself MOVE."
This is a tremendous shift. They didn't just detonate a bomb nearby the subject, the PLACED a bomb near the subject and detonated it. In my opinion that is not law enforcement, that's assassination.
Opinions aside there are a few questions raised: does the bomb squad keep a stock of bombs around? Are they fragmentary devices? Undirected charges or directional? Did they fabricate this bomb themselves or repurpose an existing explosive? Is this something they train for or were they improvising on scene (potentially risking even more lives)? Who made the risk/benefit determination? Similarly, who approved this action? The police chief? The Mayor? Governor? FBI? Justice department? Was compliance with the posse comitatus act waived? By whom?
What I wondered is: did the suspect have a gas mask? If not (I haven't seen anything that said he did), why not launch some tear gas - or even have the robot deploy it - rather than an explosive device?
If they took the guy alive, then perhaps they could have gotten information on accomplices etc.
After killing an officer, the waiting for surrender bullshit goes straight out the window.
If you kill, you should expect to be killed, end of story.
Why are cops sacrosanct compared to the populous? what about due process?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
They effectively used a suicide bomber with an IED to get the job done.
Something that we, as America, have a tendency to denounce whenever it's used against us. .. outstanding.
We're not going to shoot them anymore, we're going to blow them up . . . . . . lol .
What's next ? We going to strap a suicide vest on the K9's, let them run the suspects down ? :|
Maybe fill a police car with explosives and drive it into the house the bad guys are holed up in ?
Here's a thought, maybe someone should take a step back and figure out what the problem is
here. ( Hint: Police keep killing folks. Many of them unarmed, in handcuffs, and mostly black )
Of all the people killed by police under questionable circumstances, how many times were the police
prosecuted for it ?
Exactly.
Once enough folks lose faith in the system, they will cease to rely upon it. The results can be quite
devastating. The police love to tell everyone " This is a war ! ". Though now that folks are no longer playing
by their rules, the game becomes a little more difficult to play doesn't it ?
I suppose the same argument can be made for the Government's behavior as of late. ( I'm looking at you
FBI ) When the rich and powerful get a free pass to do whatever they want, the rest take notice. When
that system pisses enough people off, I would expect the reaction will be very similar.
How has the hashtag inspired violence? The police killings of blacks is what is inspiring the violence and murder.
It has inspired violence by creating a perception that police thinks and acts otherwise. That perception is ubiquitous. While blacks do get killed by police at higher per capita rates, the hashtag created a perception that blacks are the new indians and cops are the new cowboys trying to wipe out the indians. Which is absurd. Policing black neighborhoods saves more black lives than it takes. Most of black homicide victims are killed by criminals rather than by cops. So cops' presence in black neighborhoods is an overall net positive for the those neighborhoods. The fact that some policemen can't handle the stress of the job, snap and kill innocent civilians is an indication that there needs to be better periodic re-evaluation of the police officers for suitability for non-desk jobs. The fact is that more innocent white people are killed by cops than innocent black people, but per capita rates are higher for blacks. But the difference in these per capita rates does not rise to the level of exaggerated perception that there is a war on black people being fought by cops. This perception was not born out of reality. It was born out of the BLM movement.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Only one thing about the whole recent train of events is new:
Smartphones. They've either ripped our heads out of the sand, or overturned a rock, whichever metaphor you prefer. Now what police have long been accused of, and what could reasonably be viewed skeptically, is out in the open.
Should the shooter have done it? No, but that's immaterial.
Was it wrong? Yes, but that's immaterial.
Should he have been engaged with lethal force? Yes, but that's immaterial.
Brutalize a population long enough, and they'll strike out. Forget right and wrong: they WILL, and we can't talk it away or threaten it away. If you don't remove the stimulus, it will just keep happening. And thanks to the smartphone, we now know whether the stimulus is still around or not.
The problem with "just say no" (and the resulting DARE programs) is that it's effectively the same as taking a policy of teaching "abstinence only" in schools. It would have been a lot more useful for me to have a drug education program in school that, yes, told me to not take drugs but, at the same time educated you on the real effects of drugs: "If you drink, don't drive or do anything else that requires precise motor coordination", "If you take LSD, do it with other people and, if possible, have a chaperon", "Hydration is vitally important if you are taking ecstasy", etc, etc.
People are going to take drugs. An "abstinence only" policy towards drugs is going to result in unnecessary deaths.
Detroit as lots of problems, but poverty isn't actually the worst or most intractable of them.
* Detroit is fairly small in terms of land area compared to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta... and a HUGE portion of its land area was polluted decades ago in ways that would probably shock people in CHINA.
* If sufficiently-bad environmental pollution is discovered on a tract of land, the current owners are legally on the hook for 100% of the clean-up costs... regardless of whether those costs exceed the value of the land, and regardless of whether the current owners actually had anything at all to DO with the pollution. During the early 20th century, American factories did some really awful things that would never pass muster today... and Detroit was Ground Zero for American Industry. As a result, no sane company will DARE to take ownership of land in Detroit that's likely to be polluted. Not even if the city/county/state/feds gave it to them for FREE. Because that cheap/free plot of land could end up costing them literally unlimited amounts of money for clean-up costs. And the city can't even indemnify purchasers, because the city ITSELF is insolvent & the feds could still turn around and force the new owner to eat 100% of the costs itself.
* Pollution aside, most of Detroit is what's called a "lienfield" (pun on "minefield"). Many of the properties in Detroit have old city liens whose amounts far exceed any conceivable value of the property. In theory, the city could write the old, uncollectable liens off in order to get the property back into productive use again... but in reality, it can't afford to. The value of those old liens might be a polite fiction that exists only on paper... but it's a polite fiction that's propped up what's left of Detroit's credit rating. If Detroit started writing off old liens, its credit rating would plunge.
If America wants to save Detroit (the literal city of Detroit... the larger metro area is doing just fine), the best place to start would be to change the laws for environmental liability so that someone who buys a property there in good faith, then discovers an environmental nightmare below the surface that they literally had nothing whatsoever to do with, could at least wash their hands of the loss and walk away without being on the hook for more than what they paid for the property.
Note that this problem isn't unique to Detroit... cities all across the "Rust Belt" have problems with abandoned factories rendered untouchable by legal liability. Detroit just happens to have a lot MORE of them relative to its total land area. THIS is the #1 reason why when a factory closes, the land it sat on sits abandoned more or less "forever", and new factories only get built on virgin land (usually, far away from those same factories).
This is also part of the reason why some have advocated having the City demolish entire blocks that have been abandoned by their owners... individually, those derelict properties are worth less than nothing... but as a vacant lot that's a square block in size, they might start to become interesting to investors. Especially if those same investors can buy SEVERAL adjacent square blocks & get the City to agree to vacate the streets & infrastructure dividing them so the property can be redeveloped as a single huge structure. And more importantly, with residents gone from the area, the former neighborhood can become the site of a new factory (that would NEVER be allowed to get built next to a residential area, no matter HOW poor it is).
Been watching these assholes sling their weight around for almost 50 years. Fuck the assholes who make the laws who empower the police. Police are just another cult group like the NRA or the Catholic Church, preying on peoples fears. Everyone wants us to feel sorry for the Police since they got ambushed, yet I didn't see any of those same assholes bitching about their fellow cult members shooting unarmed citizens. Downmod away.
You are drawing a false equality/similarity. The majority of police shooting are NOT directed at homicide suspects. So it would not be surprising to find that if one broke down the distributions of citizens killed by police to find a racial disparity in homicide suspects being killed and, as you point out, this wouldn't be surprising. However since the majority of police do not involve homicide suspects it is hard to say. It is even harder to say because the Republican controlled Congress has blocked funding to study police violence.
The founders of this nation distrusted standing armies, viewing them as inherent threats to liberty. The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation. The burning of the Capitol in 1814 might well have heralded the death of the civilian militia: the defenders, though vastly more numerous, were unarmed or poorly armed, and completely failed to impede the British Army. Even before the War of 1812, with the purchase of the original six frigates of the United States Navy, we turned away from the path of the citizen militia, and since then we have gone so far away from the ideals of our founding as to have amassed the largest and most expensive defensive force that the world has ever seen.
There have been a handful of examples where the U.S. Military has been used against its own citizens, but overall the threat to (domestic) liberty has been negligible, although the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII could be an important exception to the rule. The Founders' fears of standing armies were completely mistaken -- or were they?
Until the middle of the 19th Century, guns were expensive, time-consuming to maintain and to fire, and police forces when they existed at all were armed with swords and clubs. During the middle of the 19th Century, however, we see a great shift in American society and culture. The Civil War spread both arms and conflict, and men like Samuel Colt both popularized and enabled gun ownership on a wide scale. It was (as far as I am aware) during this era that police forces were instituted -- and armed.
Today we have a national crisis. The country resounds with gunfire, and daily we hear of new atrocities, of acts of brutality, and of ever-greater police powers. I believe that we have taken the idea of the citizen soldier to its ultimate bloody conclusion, and that we must disband this hostile Army which has set itself over us. I believe we also have a duty to disband the Gun Culture or perhaps even to disarm ourselves as well, given the failure of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the examples of other countries around the globe. We have badly strayed from our founding principles. We have a new Civil War which is escalating daily. We need to drastically revise our society, starting with our Police.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
He just killed 5 people and wounded others. The five he killed were armed and trained. Of course he was an imminent threat. Would you walk into a building some fuknut was likely trying to lure you into after all that? I'll admit that the remote control drones have encouraged a casual attitude toward killing in other theaters, but there was nothing casual about this particular event. They absolutely made the right call to not risk any more lives trying to take that guy. If I was going to debate against use of drones I wouldn't start with the incident where it was unquestionably the best decision.