LAPD’s robotic canine: Friend or foe?
- James Bao
- Nov 29, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 30, 2024
Experts weigh in on the deployment of SPOT, the robot pup.
By James Bao
November 29, 2023
Published on Annenberg Media
In Los Angeles, there’s a new officer on patrol — and reactions are mixed. The Los Angeles Police Department deployed their newly acquired technology, a canine-looking robot, at a standoff with an “armed” man in Hollywood on Nov. 8.
Officers arrived around 4 a.m. at the intersection of Melrose and Western avenue after receiving a report of an armed man on a metro bus. They were unsuccessful at establishing contact with the suspect, which led to the deployment of the robodog to get a better view of the interior of the bus.
The robot, otherwise known as a “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV),” assisted officers at the scene to confirm the man’s location and status — asleep.
After a two hour standoff the man awoke, got off the bus, spoke to the police and was taken into custody for further questioning. His weapon turned out to be a BB gun.
Following an 8-4 vote at a city council meeting in May, the Los Angeles Police Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at supporting local police, received the greenlight to donate SPOT, a Q-UGV machine valued at nearly $280,000, to the LAPD.
But concerns and criticism started long before.
In 2021, the public first saw police use this robot in New York City. “Digidog” was the name given to the technology by the New York Police Department.
After its deployment in a home invasion and at a public housing building, the robot dog was compared to dystopian surveillance drones by critics for its aggressive policing, especially in low-income communities or communities of color, according to the New York Times.
“It may not be at a specific point that an AI system becomes unethical, but that its use and its values might have the potential for harm, from the beginning.” Jasmine McNealy, associate professor in the Department of Media Production, Management and Technology at the University of Florida in a statement to Annenberg Media.
New York Councilman and Democrat Ben Kallos compared New York’s Digidog to the robotic killer dogs featured in a 2017 episode of TV show “Black Mirror” and called the device’s presence a sign of “police militarization,” according to a press release in March 2021.
As a result of the backlash and its ethical concerns, the NYPD ended its lease with Boston Dynamics, the robot’s manufacturer, four months earlier than intended.
L.A. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said he has always disagreed with police usage of the robot dogs. “This surveillance [of Digidog in New York] is not only disturbing, it is deeply unjust,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, before voting no at the L.A. Public Safety Committee meeting in January. “Especially when talking about low-income tenants and communities of color”, he added, calling it a dystopian machine.
Professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati John Eck said questions about the technology’s ethics are better put to the machine’s developers.
“If they are donating the robodog and collecting data to do an evaluation (made available to the public) that will help improve the robopup’s abilities to do good, then they are on the right side of things,” Eck wrote to Annenberg Media. “If they are expecting taxpayers to fund their experiment, collect no useful information and do not make the information public, they have transgressed.”
David Thomas, veteran police officer and professor of forensics studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, weighed in on the situation.
Thomas said the public’s opinion toward SPOT may stem from negative media portrayals such as the killer robot dog depicted in the 2005 film War of the Worlds.
“That’s what people see, that’s what they see on the Internet, that’s what they see on social media. So law enforcement has to do a better job of explaining themselves and showing people exactly what [SPOT] can do.” David Thomas
But Thomas said there’s less to worry about than critics claim.
“Critics might be looking at it as like a war of the worlds kind of thing, where the dogs are out attacking people and they think that there’s some other brain that’s driving it,” Thomas said. “The reality is, in this case, that machine is being guided by a law enforcement officer on the other side who has to abide by all of the state statutes and department policies.”
L.A.’s Public Safety Committee voted on whether the private donation of SPOT is permitted in January before the decision was ultimately made by the city council.
It was approved 4-1.
In May, the city council approved the implementation of the robotic canine on L.A. streets but with a short leash.
The LAPD must provide quarterly reports on Spot’s time, reason and outcome of deployment, along with any issues in operation, according to the L.A. Times.
Additionally, police said that the device would only be dispatched in situations that require SWAT responses.
Hamid Khan, an organizer of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, said he took LAPD’s promise with a grain of salt.
“There’s a long history of mission creep with the LAPD that what we have seen and everything we have called out has then suddenly been transformed into a much wider expansion of its deployment,” he said, comparing the robot dog to the normalization of helicopter fleets and SWAT itself.
Eck predicted that SPOT will go down one of two paths in the next five years. “In five years, the technology is [either] abandoned for the next sparkly object, or become mainstream and people complain when it’s not used,” he wrote.
Before its deployment last week, the robotic canine was seen in Koreatown in early August, which LAPD Assistant Chief Dominic Choi said he believed to be the first time the tool was utilized on the streets.
In the Koreatown standoff that involved an armed man and police shooting, SPOT was able to retrieve two weapons near the suspect, giving officers safe passage to take the man into custody, according to ABC 7 Los Angeles.
The LAPD declined to comment on the effectiveness of the robot dog in recent deployments and on the department’s future plans for the technology.
