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Let’s compare this to the police-abolitionist left’s latest martyr. On September 15th, the NYPD shot and wounded a man named Derrell Mickles. Two bystanders were also wounded by gunfire, as was one of the officers on scene. (Apparently by a ricocheting bullet.) In stark contrast to the standard complaint about trigger-happy American cops, this scenario is an example of a very common problem, which is police officers being too reluctant to shoot.
The narrative being circulated is that the NYPD “killed a man over a $2.90 subway ticket.” Well, leaving aside the fact that nobody actually died, this is also a lie, because Mickles was shot for repeatedly charging at police officers with a knife. Mickles had jumped the turnstile at a subway station twice in the span of ten minutes. The first time he did so, police followed him and asked him to leave, which he did. Nobody was shot during this encounter, but Mickles brandished a large knife before departing the station. When he then returned and jumped the turnstile a second time, police followed him onto the platform, where the shooting occurred.
As early as 2:28 into the video, Mickles says to an officer, “I’m gonna make you kill me.” He then repeatedly shouts, “Shoot me!” as the officers ask him probably twenty times to drop the knife. 3:25 is the first time that Mickles moves toward police aggressively; at this point in the encounter it would unquestionably be justified to deploy a taser, and probably ruled justified to use deadly force. Instead, they hesitate, and seconds later the subway train enters the station and Mickles gets on an occupied Subway train with a knife in his hand. The police’s reluctance to shoot Mickens has now created a situation that is far more dangerous to the public. At this point the officers deploy tasers multiple times, striking Mickles at least once; he was almost certainly on drugs during the encounter, because he shrugs off the taser. Only at this point, with Mickles now having departed the train and re-entered the platform, do the officers pull the trigger, with their backstop being the subway train, rather than the empty platform it would have been had they shot him when they first had the chance. Their indecision - their reluctance to shoot another person even when that person is armed, dangerous, and actively goading them into shooting him - endangered their own lives and the lives of others.
Can you understand why I might look toward the decisiveness, the cold competence of a robot cop who’s not afraid of libelous press coverage or administrative leave or criminal charges by an anti-cop DA, and think, “Hell yeah, let’s get some more of that.” I want men like Derrell Mickles to be dispatched quickly and without fanfare, rather than allowed to put the public at risk. Police officers are nervous, pumped up on adrenaline, and can easily forget their training under stress. A robot would have done what needed to be done, and all the people on that train could have been on their way.
I thought you were going somewhere else until the last paragraph. The tools of violence that the police have access to aren't actually very good at their jobs: Guns cause deadly wounds and may unintentionally hit bystanders, Tasers are much less reliable, and hand-to-hand fights (possibly with batons) inherently involve risk to the officers.
A remote-controlled (not autonomous) bot has the potential to be safer and more targeted than a gun, more incapacitating than a taser, and less risky than getting personally involved. If the police had an effective bot (that doesn't exist in 2024) in the subway, they could've simply arrested him after he started brandishing the knife. No muss, no fuss, and only the only risk is some equipment damage if he gets a good stab in.
Right, I’m in favor of developing and utilizing remote-controlled arrest robots in the short term to see how well that goes; I agree that it would significantly reduce a number of risks and make the arrest process far more efficient and effective. If that goes well enough, we might not even need to progress to autonomous robocops! My general point is that policing right now is severely hampered by the fallibility and vulnerability of flesh-and-blood beat cops, and that a move toward more automation and robotics in policing strikes me as a highly promising development.
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This can be translated as "this is why America will never look like northern Europe in terms of transit"
We're getting a head start. This - and not some Brian Herbert Terminator bullshit - is why the Butlerian Jihad happened:
It would be nice to have a technological solution to social problems. But all this does is centralize power in the hands of people who made things like Google Gemini a mess. You think they can't see ahead to the "imported" racial bias? They called it way ahead of time, and took steps.
For all you know, your cold robot is going to be given an androgynous body shape, will only answer to Xir and, in a twisted inversion of I, Robot, have a built in random factor to save a marginalized body every so often instead of doing the "rational" thing, for equity. It only makes sense. Getting stabbed in the subway is awful. But what about the violence done against black bodies and other justice-impacted folx? It's not an easy equation.
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The platform isn't empty though, there's people on it. You're probably right that the train has a higher density of people, although neither was particularly full. It seems pretty likely that the cops wouldn't want to open fire in a big open space like that. It seems plausible that a bullet might even fly out of the station depending on how it's aimed.
I also like the guy who refused to move from his seat while this is all happening.
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What does any of that have to do with anything i said, and how did you type all that out in under 5 minutes?
Also are you under the mistaken impression that the robot shot the guy?
I didn’t reply to you, unless you are also @Blunicorn, so I’m not sure what you mean.
No, the robot in OP’s post did not shoot anyone. What I’m saying is that I am not necessarily afraid of the replacement of human cops by robot cops, if it means an improvement in the competence and decisionmaking of police.
Odd, for some reason your comment was showing up as a child of mine. But after refreshing the page it seems to have sorted itself.
Apologies.
(Note i'm on mobile FWIW)
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