It’s kind of misleading that they put up the photo of the Spot Robot Dog, when it’s going to be the K5 that’s the one that will be “on patrol”. Even if it doesn’t commit suicide again, I bet it winds up in the Hudson very soon.
I think that’s because potential uses for SPOT go beyond passive surveillance, and it comes with a variety of attachments:
K5 looks manageable and less maneuverable…
…like the coach of the robot team:
ETA: Oops, I was imagining paint…thick, camera-obscuring paint.
they’re buying two of the dogs. initially they plan on using them for high risk situations like bomb disposal, but i have to say, ive never heard of an american police agency that doesn’t use all of the toys at their disposal whenever they want.
the next big protest will be a high risk situation in need of defusing before you can blink.
so… i think it’s a fair depiction.
( the dalek will be paired with a human officer, so probably not going swimming soon. we can only hope that its panopticon always filming nature leads to some great lawsuits against the cops. )
If you read the ArsTechnica article, it even states that it will be even less able to access areas than Robocop’s ED-209, because it will only be able to use ADA-compliant ramps. 
Hopefully tougher than the bomb disposal robots used to try to inspect Ahmad Khan Rahimi’s pressure cooker bomb.
Don’t be so sure. When I lived in NYC in the 90s, it wasn’t uncommon to find entire burnt-out police cars on their sides or roofs in more-or-less random parts of the city, and presumably they had officers nearby during the incidents. Mostly just officers pissing off the locals and paying the price, as far as I can tell, these sorts of small, local protests didn’t even make the news usually.
NOLA.com has started a series of long articles tracking the obscene shit police in the state get away with. Today’s addition is highlighting a law unique to Louisiana that says if any procedural errors happen during the onerous task of firing a cop then there is “complete nullity” where all discipline has to removed and back pay granted. This includes actual cases of cops being paid salary while in prison for violent felonies committed in uniform.
The series has been good so far, and hopefully will jolt public action to demand accountability, or (even better) to defund the police and replace them entirely
I guess this explains the robocops…
Showing it’s possible to exist in a police-free area (or with fewer officers in general):
Restructuring once the “bad apples” are gone:
50 cops, in a town of 250, in Texas, of course. $1,000,000 in tickets, I assume from out of towners, as that’d otherwise be $5,000 in tickets per capita (assuming cops don’t ticket themselves). There hired a large number of dirty cops who’d been fired for good reasons elsewhere. Sounds very much like an exposition for a violent movie.
Looking at the borders of that town, nothing about it makes sense. Much of the town is literally just the roads.
It even has a few exclaves.
Wow. I have never seen any municipal boundary so egregious before.
… can’t write tickets if they don’t have jurisdiction
The long Avenue of the law.
