Two years after the NYPD’s DigiDog freaked out the internet and the department was forced to put it down, New York City’s pro-cop mayor wants to reinstate the four-legged nightmare straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel alongside two other new cutting-edge technologies he insists can save lives.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday at a press conference in Times Square that not only will two DigiDogs make a return to the streets, the robotic dogs developed by Boston Dynamics, colloquially known within the police department as “Spot”s, will be joined by a brand new robot, the K5 ASR.
Called the K5 for short, according to NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, the autonomous security robot is equipped with more than a dozen microphones and a high-definition camera capable of reading license plates, and is made for patrolling the streets remotely. It has already been used at college campuses and some smaller police jurisdictions around the country like Huntington Park, California, according to the NYPD.
Lastly, the city unveiled the Guardian HX, a device capable of shooting a GPS tracker onto a vehicle. The device can be operated by an officer or can be attached to police vehicles as a car-mounted launcher.
The K5 robot will enter a pilot program in June or July, according to the department.
A self-proclaimed “computer geek,” Adams said Tuesday that he wants to embrace all the latest tools and tech available for public safety, and implored New Yorkers to do the same. Adams also mentioned the first time a New York DigiDog went viral after being deployed in 2021, and downplayed the sour reaction it got from the public.
“It was something that was introduced previously under a previous administration,” he said. “And a few loud voices were opposed to it, and we took a step back. That is not how I operate, I operate on looking at what’s best for the city.”
The few loud voices Adams is referring to aren’t just the thousands of social media users who compared the DigiDog to that one terrifying episode of “Black Mirror,” but former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the New York City Council, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom voiced serious concerns about surveillance and the militarization of policing.
“Please ask yourself: when was the last time you saw next-generation, world-class technology for education, healthcare, housing, etc consistently prioritized for underserved communities like this?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to the then-viral Digidog video.
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Commissioner Sewell took pains on Tuesday to reassure the public that the new police robots are nothing to be afraid of. Sewell said that facial recognition, a hot-button issue for anti-surveillance-minded New Yorkers, will not be a function the department’s robots can perform.
“There is a human being behind and responsible for every mechanism that we use,” Sewell said Tuesday. “That is our approach to any technological implementation, including the public safety tools being introduced today.”
The purchase of the two Digidogs will cost the city $750,000 altogether and will be covered using funds obtained from civil forfeiture. The K5, which the city is renting from robotics company Knightscope for seven months, will cost just over $12,000.
Adams promised that the three technologies unveiled Tuesday were just the beginning, and that several members of his office, including one of his deputy mayors and his chief technology officer, are actively looking around the globe for brand-new tools that would expand policing.
“This is the beginning of a series of rollouts we are going to do to show how public safety has transformed itself,” he said.
The new tech is already receiving serious pushback. The New York Legal Aid Society told the local NBC affiliate they want the city council to hold an immediate oversight hearing on the NYPD’s rollout of the pilot. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a nonprofit that advocates for the public’s right to privacy from mass surveillance and against the discriminatory use of that technology, also put out a statement immediately after the Mayor’s press conference.
“New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff robocop,” STOP’s executive director Albert Fox Cahn said. “Wasting public dollars to invade New Yorkers’ privacy is a dangerous police stunt. Rather than investing in evidence-based ways to protect community safety, Mayor Adams continues to fall for these high-tech schemes.”
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