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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

A dangerous criminal with an arrest warrant doesn't need to pose an immediate threat to the police, they can still run and then hurt or kill other innocent people down the line.

I'm not sure if this kind of rational/utilitarian approach to thinking about policing is useful, because soon you'll end up with a perfect surveillance state and robo executioners for "the greater good". Maybe throw some precrime work in there as well, because statisticians for example have found correlations between certain looks of people and likelihood to commit crime. What if statistically the benefit outweighs the harm, i.e. more harm is prevented than suffering of innocent people being wrongly accused? Should we then lock up people to prevent crimes they haven't even committed yet?

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I don't see how this is a relevant argument. Police can already use deadly force when someone poses an immediate threat to themselves or others. Using deadly force via a remote controlled robot when a suspect poses an immediate threat to others isn't an expansion of that use of force policy.

Killing somebody just because they're running from an outstanding warrant would be a new and terrible policy whether or not a robot was involved.

This already happened, a US citizen was killed by drone strike in Yemen ordered by the US president (Obama at the time). So yes, it is very relevant.

Who guarantees you they wouldn't do it at home if they're now given the same capability on US soil? A terrorist on the run - they could take them out by robot instead of having to go through the arduous process of an arrest and court of law. Maybe he didn't comply with orders given by the robot and ran. You see?

> This already happened

Well it’s illegal for starters.

Same reason they shipped terrorism suspects to Cubs and tortured them there. It would be illegal to do that in the US. Obviously it’s a bit weird that government officials/military can do all sorts of things overseas that would be illegal back home. It’s not something new though, US has been doing this since it first started intervening in other countries back in the 19th century.

It's illegal abroad as well. His two children were also killed in separate drone strikes, the younger one was only 8 years old and a US citizen as well. Where's the legality here, come on! I'm not an expert in American law but doubt you'll find justification for that in any legal texts.

The thing is: What could ordinary citizens do about it? The government isn't going to investigate itself, especially not a popular president that wasn't even under much pressure to do so. He brought so much change, just not the good kind: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Graph_of...

If you give the police certain powers, they're guaranteed to be abused at some point. Individual officers can be held accountable but what if the robot malfunctions? Killer bots are more than a slippery slope, they're a giant pandora's crate that should never be opened.

> A dangerous criminal with an arrest warrant

While you can make an argument about using deadly force against those types of actors (although, personally, I don't think the answer is clear cut), most concerns I've seen were around using deadly force in situations where it wasn't warranted, against people who did not truly pose an immediate risk to others.

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