“Digidog is out of the pound,” Eric Adams declared in April. The New York City mayor also insisted the successful use of the controversial robot in response to a recent building collapse should convince critics such devices can improve safety in the city.
Adams commended first responders’ use of the four-legged robot in the ruins of a parking garage collapse last week in Manhattan, in which one person was killed and five injured.
First responders used the robot to search the rubble while safety concerns about the building’s structure persisted.
“Some people call them toys,” Adams told reporters. “This is not playtime. This is real time. And this is an administration that is not going to be fearful of using everything possible to save the lives of New Yorkers and to save the lives of first responders.”
Critics said the use of such robots in the building collapse response did not negate legitimate concerns about the use of robots for surveillance and aggressive policing.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times: “While deploying a robot is, of course, appropriate in situations like this, that doesn’t eliminate the need for transparency about this and other technologies that may have the capacity to engage in massive surveillance and routinely collect massive amounts of private personal data on millions of New Yorkers.”
Critics also noted that it was not clear how useful the Digidog was in the building collapse response.
“I want to believe that these robots would be effective in a building collapse,” Albert Fox Cahn, an attorney and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told the Times. “But we need more than a couple of soundbites.”
Adams began rolling out the robots this month. New technologies were advertised as helping New York police investigate high-risk areas, CBS News reported.
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When such technologies were proposed under the former mayor, Bill Blasio, critics warned of unneeded surveillance largely used against low-income people of color. The robot dogs were withdrawn, after backlash to their use in public housing areas and in response to a home invasion in the Bronx.
Adams has also faced criticism for escalating police powers, including reinstating a notorious plainclothes unit and pledging to increase use of facial recognition technology. Such technology has been criticized as inaccurate and disproportionately used against minorities.