This is a story that John wrote about last month, but the plan still seems to be moving forward. And it involves robots, so why not?

Back in 2016, the Dallas Police Department sent a robot with an explosive device into a parking garage to blow up a sniper who had killed five police officers. That incident sparked a debate among supposed civil rights advocates over the ethics involved in using lethal robots against crime suspects. But that hasn’t stopped other police agencies around the country from adding robots to their inventory. Now, however, robots will be showing up in one of the most liberal cities in the country. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted this week to allow the SFPD to add robots with explosive devices to the force, to be used in situations where no other safe option to deal with a dangerous suspect is feasible. As you might expect, the usual activists are up in arms over the decision. (Associated Press)

The unabashedly liberal city of San Francisco became the unlikely proponent of weaponized police robots last week after supervisors approved limited use of the remote-controlled devices, addressing head-on an evolving technology that has become more widely available even if it is rarely deployed to confront suspects.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 on Tuesday to permit police to use robots armed with explosives in extreme situations where lives are at stake and no other alternative is available. The authorization comes as police departments across the U.S. face increasing scrutiny for the use of militarized equipment and force amid a years-long reckoning on criminal justice.

Police departments around the country have been adding robots to their lineups for a number of years now, though most of them don’t have any lethal weapons. The NYPD had one for a while until AOC complained about it and they were ordered to fire the mechanical dog. Last year, a company in Philadelphia began selling a robotic dog with a sniper rifle mounted on its back to the military and law enforcement agencies.

Many of the unarmed robotic dogs have uses other than terminating suspects. Bomb squads have been using robots for years, sending them to inspect suspicious packages and detonate the explosives if required. (I don’t think anyone has ever asked the robots how they feel about that line of work.)

Seeing robots armed with explosives show up in San Francisco is another matter entirely. The city has been famously soft-on-crime, particularly in recent years. Criminals are effectively coddled while businesses and homeowners are left to fend for themselves. The San Francisco City Council bragged about their “justice reform” initiatives at one point. Sending a mechanical cop out to kill dangerous criminals should have been totally out of character for them.

But those policies are likely the reason that the explosive-weilding robots are now on the way. The city simply isn’t safe anymore and politicians are getting an earful from alarmed voters. Current statistics show that San Francisco residents have a one in six chance of being the victim of either a violent or property crime this year. And if the City Council has to blow up a couple of gang members to show people that they’re serious about cleaning up their city, that’s apparently what they’re going to do.

But a robot isn’t going to be able to do anything about the city’s spiraling homelessness problem. The armies of homeless that camp out in the streets and parks are feeding into the cycle of crime and a general air of lawlessness. And you can’t clear out a homeless encampment by sending in a robot dog with a bomb. (Well, you could, at least in theory, but nobody would or should stand for that.)