SOURCE:
THE GUARDIANURL:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bomb-robot-explosive-killed-suspect-dallasby: Sam Thielman
For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded.
“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters.
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Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes about the technology of warfare, said he believed this was a first. “There may be some story that comes along, but I’d think I’d have heard of it,” he said.
Others concurred. “As far as I know, it appears to be the first intentional use of a lethally armed robot by the police in the United States,” said Elizabeth Joh, law professor at the University of California at Davis.
This is not the first time a robot designed with other functions in mind has been used as a weapon, but this kind of repurposing has until now been limited to the military. Singer said that in the early 2000s, a solider he interviewed repurposed a surveillance robot called a Marcbot with a bomb. These robots aren’t autonomous, Singer emphasized – the Marcbot “is like a toy truck with a sensor and camera mount they’d use to drive up to a checkpoint”. But this soldier had improvised: “They duct-taped an explosive and you can figure out the rest. You can see the parallels here.”
Bomb-disposal robots such as the one seen here have been used by the military as a weapon, according to Peter Singer of the New America Foundation, but never before by police.CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST OF THE STORY...