New York Residents Not Exactly Thrilled The NYPD Is Bringing Back Robot Dogs

Two-and-a half years ago, New York City announced the purchase of robot dogs for the NYPD.

The robot dogs were shortly thereafter dismissed from their duties because New York residents considered them to be creepy and dystopian.

“It’s creepy, alienating and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers,” said then Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Well, guess what?

New York City has a new mayor since then, former police officer Eric Adams, and he’s bringing back the Digidog.

“Digidog is out of the pound,” Adams said on Tuesday. “Digidog is now part of the toolkit that we are using. And trust me when I tell you this. If a person has a loved one that is in a hostage situation, they want a Digidog, a real dog, and anything else they can get, to keep their family members safe.”

Adams says the robot dogs are here to stay too.

“A few loud people were opposed to it and we took a step back,” Adams added. “That is not how I operate. I operate on looking at what’s best for the city.”

Related: Soldiers Can Now Control Robot Dogs Using Nothing But Their Minds: Watch

The New York Times also reports that the NYPD “will test out a five-foot-tall robot, manufactured by Knightscope, in the Times Square subway station starting this summer.”

The K5 Autonomous Security Robot has been used to patrol Lowe’s parking lots and to keep homeless encampments away from a San Francisco animal shelter, reports the Times.

Naturally, considering the reaction to the robot dogs in 2020, there are a lot of people who still aren’t down with Digidog and K5.

“The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said in a statement. “New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff ‘RoboCop.’”

Meanwhile, over on social media, many New York residents echoed Cahn’s feelings.

“There was literally an entire Black Mirror episode about this,” read another tweet, which was not wrong.

“It’s gonna get stripped!” another person commented.

“Can’t ever be prosecuted if things go wrong,” another person observed.

“Nothing a baseball bat, some bungee cords and two rolls of duct tape couldn’t handle,” another tweet read.

Eh, no worries… assuming the robot dogs haven’t gotten any harder to defeat than they were back in 2021.