With this, San Francisco has officially crossed the line into dystopia: A non-profit in the gentrifying Mission District has rented robotic rent-a-cops from a local startup in order to prevent crime and police homeless people.
The non-profit in question, the San Francisco branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), has been using robots to patrol its parking lot and the surrounding streets since November, according to multiple reports. Now, the city is saying it’s time to stop. Officials with the city of San Francisco have told the SPCA that without a permit, robo-patrolling is illegal on the surrounding sidewalks, according to the San Francisco Business times.
If they don't comply with the city's order to stand down its robot, the SPCA would face fines of up to $1,000 a day. The robot, dubbed "K9" by the SPCA, is developed by a Silicon Valley startup called Knightscope, based in Mountain View, California.
“We weren’t able to use the sidewalks at all when there’s needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment,” Jennifer Scarlett, the S.F. SPCA’s president, told the San Francisco Business Times.
As startups and tech companies devour millions of square feet of office space in the city, long-standing residents have been displaced, evicted and gentrified out. While Forbes recently declared San Francisco the “The Hollywood of Technology,” San Francisco also has the sixth highest homeless population of a city in the U.S. The idea that there is a class war between moneyed techies and everyone else is a common sentiment, which makes the optics of a start-up's police bots harassing the homeless particularly hard to stomach.
Fran Taylor, a local resident, had been active in trying to ebb the tide of delivery robots in San Francisco before having an encounter with a K9 robot while she was walking her dog. Ominously, the robot started to move in on her and her pet before stopping about ten feet away. The robot stopped because of motion sensory features, but Taylor told the San Francisco Business times that she doesn’t trust that technology to be reliable.
Taylor may be onto something, as it’s been reported that one of the robots ran over a child in Palo Alto.
“The robot hit my son’s head and he fell down facing down on the floor, and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward,” the child’s mother told ABC7.
Naturally, the local homeless population has not been happy with the new private, robotic police force either. According to Scarlett, a group of homeless people “put a tarp over it, knocked it over and put barbecue sauce on all the sensors,” Scarlett said.
Taylor, for one, isn't backing down on her anti-bot crusade. She told the Business Times that the robotic security is “like an obvious attack on the very people in San Francisco who are already having such a hard time surviving in this expensive city.”
Shares