Policing robots make the rounds

Last fall, a convicted drug dealer who broke his parole in Lubbock, Texas, attempted to flee police by barricading himself in a Days Inn motel room. Police tried to negotiate with the suspect, but that failed, resulting in a SWAT team standoff and an exchange of gunfire.

Finally, local authorities sent a wheeled, one-armed robot to the man’s room. The robot shot tear gas through a window, prompting the suspect to jump out. Remote operators then rolled the robot on top of him, pinning him to the ground until officers could arrest him.

Ryan Fillman, a lieutenant with the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office, said his office uses robots as often as several times a month, whether to negotiate with a barricaded suspect or to inspect a suspicious package.

“It’s for sure a tool in the toolbox that I think that every SWAT team and bomb squad should have,” he told me. “We don’t have to go put a human in harm’s way.”

Whether they’re taking down armed suspects, patrolling apartments, or diffusing bombs, robots are the latest trend in crime-fighting tech. Creators laud robots as an efficient option for security and law enforcement, and U.S. police departments are experimenting with the latest machines. But some experts question these tools’ usefulness and worry about privacy, cost, and potential abuse of force. Will the rise of police robots mean the loss of human touch?

While some robots are specialized to deal with particularly dangerous situations—think bomb threats and armed criminals—others are designed for the more mundane task of routine patrolling.

William Santana Li, the CEO of policing robotics company Knightscope, said robots fill a nationwide security need. Li argues there are not enough officers to monitor the U.S. effectively: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were fewer than 800,000 police officers and detectives in the country in 2023—about 1 for every 400 Americans. Meanwhile, some police departments continue to struggle with recruitment.

“What we need to do is to provide some new tools for officers and guards to be in multiple locations at the same time,” Li said. “So, the robots can go monitor the monotonous, boring, sometimes dangerous areas and redeploy the humans to where you actually need a human.”

Knightscope’s K5 robots are meant to patrol places like apartments, parking garages, corporate offices, schools, and neighborhoods. Li said the robots, which weigh 300-400 pounds and stand 5 feet tall, are a deterrent to crime by their physical presence alone.

If the robots do come across suspicious activity, such as spotting a person at night in a parking garage that should be empty, the machines send an alert to employees at Knightscope. The employees then check the robot’s video footage to determine next steps, such as directing the robot to make a warning announcement or calling in human police aid.

Knightscope claims its robots reduced crime reports by 46% and increased arrests by 27% across the city of Huntington Park, Calif., from 2018 to 2019.

“There’s no excuse not to be using the most advanced public safety technology tools out there to protect the people,” Li said.

Another company, Transcend Robotics, sells robots that can climb stairs and breach doors. About 300-400 law enforcement agencies around the country deploy the company’s robots, typically in situations with hostages or a barricaded suspect, according to Eric Habeeb, the director of sales.

“It’s now become a tool in 2025 where you’d rather have it and not need it, than need and not have it,” Habeeb said.

But Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that policing and patrolling robots add more social media hype than safety value.

“Police robots are kind of a solution in need of a problem,” Guariglia said. “They are an expensive toy that seems cool. Oftentimes, police get a lot of news coverage out of buying and adopting these robots. But in terms of how they are actually useful, I don’t think police have really proved that they need all these new semi-autonomous robots.”

For example, Guariglia cited the Honolulu Police Department’s 2021 purchase of a $150,000 Boston Dynamics robot—a four-legged machine that can climb obstacles like a dog. Police ultimately used the expensive robot to take people’s temperatures at a city-run homeless shelter. News of the purchase made national headlines and received backlash for being an irresponsible use of federal pandemic relief money.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says “the jury is still out” on whether such robots can have a positive effect on safety. “You have to look at the whole picture and not just one anecdote or one successful story,” he said.

Stanley added that authorities should ask their communities if they even want these tools before spending the money on them. In 2021, the New York City Police Department stopped using a leased Boston Dynamics robot after facing backlash over cost and concerns of abuse of force. In 2023, the department tried to deploy a K5 patrol robot from Knightscope, only to end the program with little explanation a year later. (NYPD did not respond to my request for comment.)

Critics of police robots are concerned about the machines being armed with lethal weapons and used to kill, subdue, push, constrain, or harm people. In 2016, Dallas police officers used a bomb-equipped robot to kill an armed man suspected of fatally shooting five fellow officers at a protest. A grand jury chose not to charge the officers for the killing.

Several states have attempted to regulate the weaponization of robots, but no bills have been passed as of yet. Guariglia said that even if the robots aren’t armed, he still has concerns about a data-collecting “robotic police state” as these tools go beyond what normal surveillance cameras can do and see.

Danny Garcia, the CEO of security company JDS Security, a San Diego–based vendor of Knightscope robots, has seen people’s concerns about robots dissipate once they see their value.

One of his customers, he said, was skeptical of the effectiveness of a robot that patrolled her apartment complex. But then the robot stopped her car from being vandalized.

JDS deploys robots to patrol apartment complexes, shopping centers, and parking lots and is looking into putting them outside houses of worship. Garcia said the response has been similar to when his company first started using surveillance cameras 13 years ago.

“There was a lot of pushback. Now fast-forward 13 years later, every property has cameras,” Garcia said. “So now with this, it’s still a little new, but at least I know we are ahead of the game.”