Yana Welinder is a program manager at Carbon, a nonresidential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She is on Twitter (@yanatweets). This opinion does not reflect the views of the author’s employer or affiliated organizations.

The use of robots inevitably changes the equation for how police apply "use of force," a term that is broadly defined by the International Association of Chiefs of Police as the "amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject."

We don’t have enough details about the stand-off in Dallas to assess whether deadly force was necessary. To use deadly force, the police must have believed that it was necessary to protect the public or that there was an immediate threat of death or other serious harm to themselves.

Robots may save police officers’ lives, and enable them to use less force in apprehending suspects, which, in turn, will allow for fair trials for suspects.

But in the future, police robots may make some threats less immediate, and perhaps de-escalate situations, reducing the need for deadly "use of force."

For example, if a robot is used to confront an armed suspect — as opposed to putting an officer’s life on the line — it could assist with an arrest by exercising some form of nondeadly force, like releasing a chemical gas.

In 2014, the Albuquerque police did just this: They used a robot to "deploy chemical munitions” in a motel room where a man had barricaded himself with a gun, forcing him to surrender.

If appropriate rules and regulations can be agreed upon by law enforcement and society, the use of robots by the police is very promising. Robots may save police officers’ lives, and enable them to use less force in apprehending suspects, which, in turn, will allow for fair trials for suspects. Robots could be used to, say, communicate with a hostage-taker or detect explosives. Still, appropriate rules for the use of robots would limit their deployment: If robots were used too widely, it would only serve to dehumanize law enforcement.

And we need to be wary about the precedents we set. So far, we have only seen robots that execute the decisions of human police officers. But there is a movement to proactively bar robots from engaging in completely autonomous killing, which is not ridiculous considering we may eventually end up with artificial intelligence that is sophisticated enough to make decisions in crisis situations. What's more, earlier uses of robots under human supervision will likely inform the use of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence programming may rely on past robot operations to calculate the appropriate use of force, or courts may take previous situations into account when determining whether a decision made by a machine was proportionate.

It is important that law enforcement establishes precedents for using minimal force now, before those precedents are set incidentally.



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