Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 1 (Xinhua) Police in San Francisco will be allowed to use remote-controlled robots to kill suspects, and the city's supervisory board last night approved a controversial policy to allow police robots to be used as a deadly force option when the risk of loss of life for the public or the police is imminent and there is no other choice of force available.

According to Sky News, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) said it did not have any pre-armed robots and had no plans to arm its existing machines. Allison Maxie, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, explained in a statement that the department's robots can now be equipped with explosives to contact suspects in extreme cases and disable violent, armed or dangerous suspects to save or prevent further threats to innocent lives.

Currently, the San Francisco Police Department has 17 robots, 12 of which are running. These machines can be broadly divided into two categories: large and medium-sized tracking robots used to remotely inspect or detonate explosives (such as Remotec F6A and Qinetiq Talon), and small robots designed to be thrown into target areas for reconnaissance and surveillance (such as iRobot FirstLook and Recon Robotics Throwbot). All robots owned by the San Francisco Police Department are designed to be mainly operated by humans and have limited automatic functions.

Police in the United States are already using remote robots to kill suspects, and the first such incident is believed to have occurred in 2016, when police in Dallas used bomb disposal robots to kill a sniper who shot and killed five police officers at a rally. At the time, the operation was praised by some and criticized by others for quickly ending the hours-long standoff, saying the police executed the suspect without running out of other options. At the time, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said the police "thought they had no choice but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension line to detonate where the suspect was."

The Associated Press reported that the policy in San Francisco was passed by 8 votes to 3 after a two-hour debate.

The proposal has been criticized by many civil rights groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says this is a typical police-military mission creep, in which hardware developed for war zones is deployed to civilians.

CTOnews.com learned that police departments in other parts of the United States had rejected similar proposals, such as the Oakland police department, which initially approved the use of robots to kill suspects remotely, but later overturned the decision without explanation.

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