In the midst of a deadly shooting of Dallas police officers Thursday night during a peaceful protest, officers did something a police department has never done before: They used a robotic bomb to deliberately kill a suspect.
After hours had passed in a parking garage standoff, the robotic system delivered an explosive and killed the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the subject was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a news conference Friday morning. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger."
This established a new way to use robots for a lethal purpose, which invites the inevitable question: Does this represent a new frontier of policing, where the use of drone-like weapons can be used against American civilians?
According to Police Commissioner Evans, the possibility of a future similar situation in Boston isn’t totally out of the question. “That was a very tense, extraordinary situation,” Evans said in an interview with Boston Public Radio on Tuesday. “Given the same situation, I believe I would do the same thing for the safety of my officers.”
During the attack in Dallas, fourteen people, 12 officers and two civilians, were shot. Of those, five officers were killed. “Faced with the threat they had, I don’t know what other choice they had,” Evans said, “but that’s not going to become a common practice.”
According to Evans, the Boston Police Department uses robotic technology in the way that most police departments and bomb squad forces around the world do, to disarm bombs or surveil a bomb situation. “I don’t think we have ever used it like Dallas and we don’t intend on using it like Dallas, but those robots are very effective on carrying away potential explosive devices, and that’s what we use our robots for,” Evans said. “They’re able to walk up, take a picture, if need be, grab the device, and move it to a location that is safer.”
According to Evans, he wouldn’t rule the possibility out, depending on the context. “Do you risk having officers walk up, or have further damage? I think those were extraordinary circumstances,” he said. “They used the bomb to neutralize someone who wanted to continue to cause a lot of harm.”
To hear more from Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
