On Tuesday, The San Francisco Board of Supervisors increased police militarism in an eight to three vote. The highly controversial policy, which still requires a second vote and the mayor’s approval to be implemented, would give robots deployed by the San Francisco Police Department the power to kill civilians in “extraordinary situations.”
The policy would only allow the use of these bomb-detonating ground-based robots “when the risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent, and officers cannot subdue the threat after using alternative force options or de-escalation tactics.”
In the televised board meeting, the supervisors determined the SFPD needed this power because of hypothetical scenarios where the city of San Francisco could be attacked by suicide bombers, hostile foreign governments, or mobs of angry right-wingers attempting a January 6th-style coup. But, of course, no one investigated the defective logic, which says the police’s rational response to a bomb threat should be the police detonating one themselves.
Despite San Francisco’s reputation of being a bunch of rainbow Marxists, it seems as though the city’s liberals have taken on a new slogan, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a bomb is a good robot with a bomb.”
Aaron Peskin, a board member in support of the policy, explained, “There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm.”
While the supporters of this policy call critics “anti-police,” one thing remains unclear: Do the board members truly believe that equipping the police, provenly incapable of de-escalation and predisposed towards trigger happiness, with bomb detonating robots is rational policymaking? Or could it be more probable that eight of the eleven board members have a prominent donor who will make millions off the sale of this technology to the SFPD?
