New York City Police Department officials announced Tuesday that authorities added a dystopian robotic K-9 unit named “Spot” to its ranks as crime increases citywide and the department struggles to manage its limited resources effectively.
City officials, including Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, unveiled the “Digidog” with two other pieces of technology the department plans to roll out in the city, arguing the advanced equipment is crucial for resident safety.
“Digidog is out of the pound,” the mayor said, according to The New York Times.
Authorities claim the unit would assess high-risk situations and “undoubtedly” save the lives of police officers and the public. The device would be used to de-escalate situations involving hostage negotiations, counterterrorism incidents, and others, as needed, NBC reported.
“Instead of sending police officers in there, you send Digidog,” Adams said.
Officials reportedly said two robot dogs would cost the city $750,000.
“To safeguard our modern city in a forward-looking world, it is essential that our officers are equipped with the tools, training, and technology necessary to do that job safely and effectively,” Sewell said in a Tuesday morning press conference in Times Square. “Throughout its history, our department has leveraged the latest available technology and pioneered ways to do our work.”
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Other technology introduced on Tuesday by city officials included a device called StarChase, a pilot program that allows authorities to track vehicles using GPS-enabled devices attached to projectiles to locate ghost cars and cars with stolen plates.
“This is a game changer,” the NYPD said.
City officials also unveiled the K5 Autonomous Security Robot pilot program, which patrols confined areas indoors and outdoors to provide incident notification in real-time to first responders. Authorities hope to use the technology starting this summer.
“This is the beginning of a series of rollouts we are going to do to show how public safety has transformed itself…if we were not willing to move forward and use technology on how to properly keep cities safe, then you would not keep up with those who are doing harmful things to hurt New Yorkers,” Adams said.
Although Sewell noted that neither the robotic dog nor the K5 would come with facial recognition technology, the move from city officials received instant backlash.
Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, condemned the move from the city’s police force to the Times.
“The N.Y.P.D. is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing,” Cahn said in a statement. “New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff ‘RoboCop.’ Wasting public dollars to invade New Yorkers’ privacy is a dangerous police stunt.”
The Legal Aid Society opposed the new technology announced by city officials in a news release, calling it “new dystopian technologies to surveil New Yorkers.”
“Mayor Adams continues to pour money into the NYPD’s bloated budget, enabling police to impose new, dystopian surveillance technologies throughout the city without meaningfully engaging New Yorkers in a conversation about whether this is how we want to live,” the group said.
Headlines about acts of violence in the city of more than eight million people are constant and major crimes did indeed spike last year in New York City.
Despite NYPD reporting that violent crime dropped during the first three months of this year, the city has become home to the largest violent crime rate in New York, with 49,124 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
However, CBS reported authorities said shootings declined by 23% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year, homicides fell by 12%, and rape decreased by 7%. The department also said burglary decreased by 6%.
At the end of 2022, NYPD statistics showed murder rates and other major crimes increased across New York City in November despite authorities claiming the overall index crime decreased by just over 1% compared to the same time last year.
While the report details crimes like burglary, grand larceny, and cases of rape dropped as much as 14%, other stats show felony assaults were up 3%, robberies jumped by 3.6%, and car thefts jacked up to 9.4%. However, most notably, the police report showed 30 homicides occurred in the city during November, up from 25 in the same month during 2021.
The Daily Wire previously reported police officers in New York City are resigning at a record-breaking pace this year. In the first two months of 2023, 239 officers left the New York City Police Department, substantially more than the 176 who left in 2022 and the 110 who left in 2021 during the same time period.
If resignations continue at the current pace, about 1,400 officers will have quit the department by the end of the year. Some of the officers are going to work for New York’s metro system, while others have moved to states like Florida.