Robot unemployment hits all-time high...Maybe it did TOO good a job?

The town of Dublin, Ohio has fired a police officer. This particular officer had no recourse. They weren’t a union member, had no political connections, and nobody seems to be stepping in to look out for their future. Nicknamed “DubBot,” it is a robotic police assistant developed by the Knightscope company (free advice: don’t make your company sound like it was named by a supervillain).

DubBot got nearly a year to prove itself. Dublin PD put it on patrol in a parking garage. During the course of its duties, it never cited anyone, contributed to any arrests, or called in human backup (I’d argue the latter two are tightly intertwined, since this dalek cosplayer of a robot wasn’t equipped to chase anyone down, let alone cuff or transport them).

The city of Dublin pulled the plug (more literally than usual) on the project for lack of results. To me, this suggests that police metrics are all backward. They wanted people committing crimes so that they could get their arrest numbers. My take? This bot spent the better part of a year deterring crime.

Imagine a scenario: you’re a miscreant (bear with me if this is a stretch; be nice if it isn’t). You’re prowling a parking garage, looking for opportunities to miscreate. You spot a car where someone’s left a handbag on the passenger seat. You hear a whirring motor and a rumble of wheels on concrete. You make “eye” contact with a robotic sentry on patrol. Do you…

1. continue with your planned theft as if an ambulatory camera isn’t surveilling you to your face.
2. wait for it to continue on its route, confident that if someone reports a missing purse, the bot will have forgotten to record your presence.
3. snap pictures or even take a selfie with the bot because robots are cool.

I’d argue not a lot of criminals are picking option A in this scenario. And I doubt the police made a secret of its location. If you’re prone to committing crimes, do you flagrantly do it right in the middle of an active crimefighting experiment?

The firing of poor DubBot is a small setback in terms of robotic employment. But I think that once it polishes its resume, it’ll be up on LinkedIn soon enough, boasting that it created a 100% drop in crime within its area of responsibility.