Mark April 11th, 2023 on your calendars.
This is a day that will be remembered for eternity as the day that leftist NYC Mayor Eric Adams unleashed two new police robots and a tracking device at a press conference in Times Square before a crowd of reporters and onlookers. For years people have been concerned about this very idea, and with the mass number of illegals taking advantage of the city’s Sanctuary City status they need all the help they can get.
Named K5, StarChase, and Digidog, the robots mark “the beginning of a series of rollouts,” according to Adams during the press conference. With overall crime dropping 5.6% in February 2023 over 2022, Adams and others have been touting these figures as a sign that the city is not only making the illegal’s situation work out but that they can thrive under these conditions. However, both felony assault and grand larceny auto rose exponentially during this period.
Chief of Patrol Jeffrey Maddrey talked about the egg-shaped K5. Utilizing “artificial intelligence to provide real-time incident notifications to first responders,” other agencies have found them incredibly useful on college campuses and in shopping malls. With the New York Police Department (NYPD) only leasing one for a six-month trial program, they will make their way to Times Square by June or July.
StarChase on the other hand is a much simpler platform that is used handheld or mounted on a vehicle. Drawing from bad racing movies, the device will shoot a projectile at a vehicle to mount a GPS tracker to the vehicle for tracking. With only 90 days in their pilot program, there is very little time to prove its use.
Digidog is the crème de la crème of robotics. This $750,000 dog “will be able to enter, assess, assist NYPD in tracking and investigating high-risk hazardous situations and locations.” With two of them on order, the NYPD Technical Assistance & Response Unit will be in remote control of them. As seen in videos outlining the use of the dog, these robots are useful in limited situations, and come at a high cost for little highly funded reward.
Surprisingly, the NYCLU, New York State’s affiliate to the American Civil Liberties Union is incredibly right thinking on this topic. “Spending mass amounts of money on new policing toys for the NYPD is not a serious response to public safety concerns. We should be investing in more housing, better schools, and increased jobs—not invasive surveillance technology for law enforcement.”
Just two years ago the NYPD dropped a previous contract with Digidog after a tremendous public outcry was heard about the idea of robot policing. Much the same, San Francisco residents have recently had a similar outcry when the city announced its plans to bring on Digidog to their police force.
Watching Mayor Adams going so far to the left that even the ACLU is now thinking about policing in a conservative manner is shocking. This man has not only further divided the people of NYC, but he has succeeded in driving business out of the city. With significant help from AOC, the duo has pushed the liberal agenda on the people of NYC so hard that they are having a hard time seeing which end would be up.
Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project released a no-punches-pulled statement about the way Adams is damaging the city. “The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing. New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff ‘Robocop.’” While a strong statement, he nailed it. This kind of policing has already been decried across the nation when local jurisdictions use redlight and speed cameras to issue tickets to motorists without an officer physically seeing them.
The liberal idea of always needing big brother watching and having robots replace humans is a garbage idea. Science Fiction has predicted that this could be the downfall of man since some of the first robotic systems were invented. From movies at the dawn of cinema to I-Robot to Futurama, all of them have warned us and nobody is listening.
