THIS ROBOTIC DOG USED BY THE POLICE STIRS PRIVACY CONCERNS

DIGIDOG IS BEING TESTED TO EVALUATE ITS CAPABILITIES FOR EMERGENCY SERVICE UNITS AND BOMB SQUADS

Two men were being held hostage in a Bronx apartment. They had been threatened at gunpoint, tied up and tortured for hours by two other men who pretended to be plumbers to get inside, police said.

One of the victims managed to escape and called the police, who showed up early morning at the apartment on East 227th Street, unsure if the armed men were still inside.

The police decided it was time to deploy Digidog, a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer manoeuvring it remotely to see and hear what is happening.

Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat.

In the case of the Bronx home invasion, police said Digidog helped the officers determine that there was no one inside. Police said they were still searching for the two men, who stole a cellphone and $2,000 in cash and used a hot iron to burn one of the victims.

“The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents,” the department said on Twitter. “This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities

against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad.”

But the robot has sceptics. The City Council passed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act last June amid efforts to overhaul the police force, many of them triggered by Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

The act requires the Police Department

to be more transparent about its surveillance and technology tools, including Digidog, something civil libertarians said had been lacking.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponised.

“We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve,” he said. “So openness and transparency is key.”

The New York Police Department did not respond to requests for comment about the civil liberty concerns.

The mechanical dog is built by Boston Dynamics, a tech company known for videos of its robots dancing and jumping.