CON: NYers ‘sic’ of watchdogs already

ARECENT viral video of a robot cop dog assisting police in arresting a man at a publichousing complex provoked no small amount of alarm among New Yorkers. As well it should.

One mustn’t be deceived by their resemblance to man’s best friend. These deputized WiFidos are a different beast entirely, one that could come bristling with new capabilities to surveil and harass the public.

Stationary CCTV cameras and facial-recognition technology already pose grave risks to citizens’ privacy. Robot cop dogs offer the possibility of combining and mobilizing this technology. The ability of police to track people going about their daily lives would dramatically increase.

That should concern anyone who thinks New Yorkers already have to put up with too many petty restrictions on their public behavior.

People might not worry too much right now about being cited for jaywalking or sipping an open container. Human NYPD officers are too few and too busy to penalize most of those violations. An army of robot police dogs would make it much easier to identify and ticket minor scofflaws.

Proponents of robot cop dogs might argue they’ll keep officers out of harm’s way. Indeed, one of the earliest uses of robot dogs by NYPD came earlier this year when one was deployed to check a building for the presence of two violent kidnappers during a hostage situation.

Their use there isn’t troubling. Nevertheless, technology that makes police safer can also have the effect of encouraging them to use force in more situations than is necessary.

Bulletproof vests and armored vehicles keep police secure when kicking down a door. That security also encourages them to kick down more doors, even when public safety would be served just fine with a lesser show of force. How much more violent will police become when they can just sic a pack of robot dogs on anyone they deem a threat? There’s one other reason to dislike robot police dogs: They’re freaking scary. One can easily see their power to intimidate in people’s reactions to them in filmed viral encounters.

We should want the police and the public to have a relationship of mutual trust and respect. That’s missing in many communities today. It won’t arise if the most visible police presence in one’s neighborhood is a literal unfeeling beast.

It’s true that flesh-and-blood police dogs present their own problems. They’re still preferable to their dystopian mechanical successors.