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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

How many years until cops use drones and very fast robotic dogs to chase and apprehend people?

This is not meant as some kind of criticism, I believe that this is a fact which will become true regardless of us approving or disapproving it.

I mean from a technical standpoint, where the on-board AI and tracking abilities as well as the physical ones will be so capable that they will be able to replace humans chasing others, with the ability of evading thrown stones or other objects, possibly using tasers or fine but strong nets to prevent the chased person from continuing to flee.

A bit less than 10 years? Then how much longer until this is no longer a novelty?

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Apprehend, not in the foreseeable future.

Chase, however, I'm surprised we haven't been seeing for at least a few years. Here in Chicago, following a high-profile bystander death resulting from a police pursuit, the department adopted a new pursuit policy that effectively bans vehicular pursuits in a majority of situations.

While many contend that this policy goes too far, it's indisputable that vehicular pursuits are dangerous. The potential for tracking, for example, a robbery suspect from the air (with a considerably lower bar than scrambling one of the city's two police helicopters) via drone seems like an obvious win for safety, both in reducing dangerous pursuits and apprehending dangerous offenders.

This would be great for car chases. Police cars in high speed chases too often lead to collateral damage and lots of people get away when police disengage as a matter of policy. A drone follower would be a great improvement.

Black Mirror: Metalhead.

It’s one of the best episodes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)

Would not work very well in an urban environment where you could duck into the front of a business and go out the back way. Maybe drones + ability to remotely lock the doors of any building in the city. Or a drone swarm with built in maps of the layouts of all the buildings in the city so if someone goes into a building, they automatically split up and start watching all the exits.

I've seen videos of Ukraine where operators hit specific windows in high rises where they know Russian meetings are happening

Yeah but I’m talking about apprehending criminals around the city. Can’t just send missiles through a Starbucks.

Controversial Opinion: This is a good idea. There is zero need to make these Black Mirror lethal but tracking and apprehending is a scary job and Cops are human (there are also bad cops). Automating that process seems like Step 1 to getting out of our current strategy of

"Well cops are bad, so we can't enforce any laws".

Well-intentioned ACLU action and Public backlash have made these very hard to roll out, but long term, this may be the only the solution (along with wholesale long-term welfare overhaul of course)

> There is zero need to make these Black Mirror lethal

Nope, loot ak Ukraine. And military surplus can easily end up with the police.

I'm assuming of course we have some political control here. Just a walking robot was shamed out of existence [1]. So the public has some control over what is and isn't acceptable.

We don't need to accept lethal robots, but wholesale saying "no robotic equipment at all" will simply leave us in the logjam we have now between bad cops and zero enforcement.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/nypd-robot-dog-b...

Based on the behavior of many police departments in the US, I wouldn't put as much faith in your assumption of political control. From the "Blue Flu" to how many departments behaved both during the BLM protests and during COVID, police departments wield an amazing amount of control over their own TTP and who they seek to control.

Right but that behavior is driven (either earnestly or not) by safety concerns for the cops.

Lets remove that concern, no excuses left.

Safety concerns? Ha!

Cops would have you believe that LEO is the most dangerous job in America, but it's not even in the top 10.

Some cops may be afraid of getting shot, but consider that for every cop killed, cops kill roughly 21 citizens.

Copaganda has made everyone think that crime is terrible, cops are underpaid, overworked, and going into combat every time they report for work.

I literally said “earnestly or not”. It doesn’t really matter what the underlying truth is, it’s an excuse, let’s remove it.

No more SWAT teams needed if it’s just robots doing tracking and catching.

We've already had a swat team use a robot to kill someone using a small explosive charge. Maybe let's not head right to Cyberdyne before we address institutional issues in law enforcement before we get even more droids asking us for our papers etc.

> zero need

There's zero need for local rural cops to have MRAPs and SWAT teams, and yet...

You’re making my point. Humans are prone to this sort of largesse and they use human safety as an excuse to do so (“why don’t you want our cops safe?”).

Let’s remove that excuse.

Meta, but the way you felt you had to word your opinion really rubs me the wrong way.

Are we really at a point where we need to have a preface, two mid-sentence disclaimers, and carefully worded language just so one does not get torn apart by one's own in-group?

If that's where we're at, I'd sooner support the other camp, whatever it is.

> "Well cops are bad, so we can't enforce any laws"

When did that become our current strategy? I haven't seen any sign of it in my neck of the woods.

I live in the Bay Area. And this is basically the mentality spreading through most large cities.

Maybe that's true, but I honestly haven't seen evidence of it (at least in the big cities I'm familiar with where this claim is sometimes made). I've just seen people who claim that it's the case. From my observations, it appears to be a misunderstanding/miscommuncation that leads to this belief.

Well enforcement is down through the floor. You can measure that [1].

Cops claim it’s because of too much regulation (regulations put in place because of bad cops). It doesn’t really matter if they’re lying or not, there’s now no enforcement.

And all the political capital spent putting regulations in place now means there is none left to solve the underlying root causes of crime.

This is the dynamic playing out in most cities, esp in cities with strong police unions.

[1]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/07/01/ask-the-standard-san-franc...

But none of that supports the assertion that the attitude is "Well cops are bad, so we can't enforce any laws". It may support the assertion that "the way we're trying to address abusive policing is misguided", which is an entirely different thing.

“ the way we're trying to address abusive policing is misguided”

and as a result we have no enforcement now

That’s all I’m saying.

>How many years until cops use drones and very fast robotic dogs to chase and apprehend people?

I'd go farther than that. I'd wager that within 10 years, someone will have been shot by a mostly autonomous drone operated by a police unit somewhere. An operator will have had a approve the shot. We are probably 20-30 years from fully autonomous takedown of terrorists.

How many years until a domestic terrorism attack operated by a drone pilot followed by us never finding the person

Better chance of that happening by the end of 2024 than of Twitter being a dominant financial platform by the same time, to cross the streams of current HN threads.

That's a win for 'fusion of unrelated subjects' I think.

Do drones make it significantly easier to attack without being caught than, say, timed explosives or even firearms?

You don’t need to know where the target is going to be exactly in advance, and you don't have to personally be in firearm range or line of sight.

As robotic dogs that apprehend suspects play a major role in Fahrenheit 451, this is one of those things that should really make us pause and reflect.

Say no more! There's a YC funded startup on it already

https://paladindrones.io

Ethics issues...

Drones? Already, today.

Robotic dogs to apprehend people? I dunno.

Not only robotic dogs apprehending people, robotic dogs with posh English accents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djzOBZUFzTw

https://youtu.be/Bmy-Cr2bkZ0

they almost do that at the end.

For very slow motion stuff right now, yea. Not chasing people down though. At least not yet...

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