| The nationwide conversation around police reform is complex, occasionally contradictory, and, until recently, devoid of robots. That changed this week when New York City councilmember Ben Kallos introduced a bill to ban the city's police department from using robots armed with weapons. This may bring to mind Terminator or Black Mirror, but the ban is very much based in the real world. Kallos cited a February hostage incident in which the NYPD used a camera-enabled robotic dog—nicknamed Spot—to perform reconnaissance and scope out potential threats to officers. Boston Dynamics, the company that manufactures Spot, insists its robots will never be used to harm humans. And as long as that remains true, its tools wouldn't be banned by Kallos' proposed bill. But ethicists and robotics experts say the time for concern around police use of robots has arrived. Law enforcement across the country have used a mix of private vendors and the 1033 program, which authorizes police departments to obtain and use military equipment, to acquire robots for a variety of purposes. Some are even running drills that simulate a 2016 incident in Dallas, where police used a robot to kill a sniper. "I'm concerned that a democracy is turning domestic police into a militarized zone," one criminal justice expert says. Read more about the effort to prevent such a shift here. Sidney Fussell | Senior Staff Writer, WIRED | 
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