Originally published at: Police use robot dogs to test unhoused people for Covid | Boing Boing
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Golly if only there was a way to change the way we fund civil services so law enforcement officers weren’t the default point of contact for unhoused people.
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jesus I didn’t know the po po were so caught up on watching “black mirror” episodes .
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Or even use some of the money to provide cheap housing.
I thought untouchables was something they had in India.
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Ingress protection rating of 54, which means you could probably kill it with a deluge of water.
Now why do I find the sudden need to remember that?
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This sounds like they wanted to use Covid funds on a robot dog, so they had to come up with a BS reason to use said robot dog as it relates to Covid.
And people worry if we give homeless people money they will just spend it on booze and drugs. 
re: robot dogs
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I though checking temperature turned out to be mostly theater in early 2020? (And it’s a good thing that people in a homeless camp couldn’t possibly be suffering from another kind of ailment where they run a temperature…)
What was Police Plan A, sending in a tank and using the IR sensors?
Damn, you could build a simple open booth unit where people could voluntarily come up and check their own temperature: An IR thermometer, a proximity sensor, display, and a controller to record the stats. Is the intrusive robot even going to tell people their results? “You’re fine, have a nice day!” “Oo, you have a slight fever, please take care.”
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Temperature checks for Covid have been largely deemed ‘harmless’ but a statistically bad indicator (Ref1 Ref2 Ref3 …) Ah well, cool robot toys don’t justify themselves ("…yet")
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officer Mike Lambert of the Honolulu PD said during the city council meeting. “And during the pandemic, no one has ever heard of another law enforcement agency trying to provide shelter and overnight services for the unsheltered.”
And why is a law enforcement agency providing shelter?
“Better than the alternative, but something something horribly wrong.”
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oh, just a way to entrap people by keeping them under constant surveillance and using any excuse to harass or imprison them. gotta keep those numbers up
( now having typed that… actually there have been some court decisions that you can’t stop people from sleeping in public spaces unless there are public facilities where they could be sleeping instead.
having the police provide those facilities means no one will voluntarily use them. so win, win for the city and their real estate backers )
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We’re disrupting the market of treating people like things.
We have a response for something like this in Philly.
No terminators.
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From time to time I imagine myself explaining this future to people from twenty or thirty years ago.
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Worth noting that Vice and many other places have also documented the safe procedure for disabling these. In particular, it is the “Lockout” button, not the power button.
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It is only a matter of time before some poor fucker gets life for battering a police officer who happens to be robotic.
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What’s real fun is whenever a department spends heavily on this kind of dystopian shit the justification is always “don’t worry, it will allow us to fuck labor!”
And the Union CHEERS! And says “more of this please”.
Because something something its a WAR out there!
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o_O I don’t remember hearing about this and I live here.
The main problem(s) with providing housing for the unhoused in HI are NIMBYism, land/building prices here, and the small but persistent number of people who don’t want to deal with the rules that would inevitably accompany provided housing. We could conceivably accommodate everyone on each island in 1 or 2 apartment buildings, if we didn’t get a steady stream of people whose concept of HI dates from the last century: “I’ll just set up a tent on the beach and eat wild mangoes – what could go wrong?”
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Hmm, when exactly did I become an imaginary character inhabiting a work of (faintly ridiculous) dystopian fiction?
We couldn’t possibly defund the police. No, indeed, we should be moving all services under the umbrella of local law enforcement. Need medical care? A police officer will provide it. They don’t have any training, but that doesn’t stop them with anything else they’re tasked with…
Almost certain what happened. It’s like these very small towns with no crime that ended up with what are essentially tanks, and they use them for ridiculous bullshit like traffic stops and serving minor arrest warrants.
Is that when they deploy the SWAT team to cart them off to jail “quarantine”?
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Gee, Hawaii, isn’t that the state where it rains just about every afternoon?
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Oops!
Worse, it’d probably be a bucket of piss in a homeless encampment.
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