When people say "defund the police" this is the kind of shit they are talking about. There is no reason for a police force to have access to lethal robots. None.
As the article mentions, they are bomb disposal robots. There is absolutely reason to have a tool capable of firing a shotgun shell attached, and an arm capable of placing a charge. You could hobble the bomb squad with legislation, make their job more deadly--or you could ban this particular use.
It’s crazy how defunding the SFPD involves raising their budget every single year. It’s almost as if “the police have been defunded” is a bit of rhetoric to justify more spending and more draconian violence.
Police didn't go inside because they were scared of dying.
Were they cowards? Yes. Does calling them cowards solve the problem? No.
Robots would actually solve the problem.
In tech we have a culture of blaming the process, not people. Now, we should definitely blame the Uvalde officers for their cowardice. But we should also think about how we could improve the process around dealing with active shooters and officers who simply aren't brave enough when push comes to shove. This was not the first time, and nor will it be the last time, when innocent lives die because of afraid law enforcement officers. Let's solve this problem at the process layer.
All you need is something to grab the shooter's attention. If he is distracted by the robot then human officers have a better opportunity to take him down.
Train citizens to drive robot non-lethal surveillance drones, do paperwork, cut funding for rage prone meat bag policing.
Maintain minimum required force of trigger happies for all the shooting scenarios.
Our secular society isn’t anymore sacrosanct than religious based choices. It should be readily reorganize-able as logistics demand.
Optimizing for 24/7 status quo politics, profit margin optimizing and rent extraction “or else the world ends” is not so different from forcing unfalsifiable magic down our throats.
What I am trying to describe is a very different kind of organization of policing agency and your response is to repeat old semantics, and conclude then it’s not that new?
You posted five sentences. Three of them are mostly just vague conglomerations of charged symbology. Did you expect an entire treatise in response...?
Anyways, the point remains: the difference between a police officer and a civilian is a small amount of training and a whole lot of in-group politics. Not sure how hiring different people solves either problem.
