“In some cases, deadly force against a threat is the only option to mitigate those mass casualties,” the amendment said.Īhead of yesterday’s vote, Brian Cox, director of the Integrity Unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, called the change antithetical to the progressive values the city has long stood for and urged supervisors to reject SFPD’s proposal. But an amendment proposed by SFPD this month argued that police needed to be free to use robotic force, because its officers must be ready to respond to incidents in which multiple people were killed. Equipment from the program was used against protesters in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.Įarlier this year, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin amended San Francisco’s draft policy for military-grade police equipment to explicitly forbid use of robots to deploy force against any person. One effect of AB 481 is to add local oversight to hardware like the kind obtained through a US Department of Defense program that sends billions of dollars of military equipment such as armored vehicles and ammunition to local police departments.
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