Dallas police used a possibly unprecedented tactic in their confrontation with a man suspected of killing officers: They used a robot armed with an explosive to kill him.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said during a news conference that a negotiator spoke at length with Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, before he was killed about 2:30 a.m. Friday. Police believe Johnson is responsible for the shootings that left five officers dead and seven others wounded.
“We saw no other option than to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension to detonate where the suspect was,” Chief Brown said. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger.”
Police policy experts agreed that such a tactic was rare, if not unprecedented, in the United States.
A spokesman for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which tracks crime data in the United States, said the bureau did not have any data on the police use of robots and explosives.
“It marks the use of a new type of weapon,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor known for his work studying police issues. “It isn’t anything more than a way of, what they say is, ‘stopping the threat.’ ”
“If you can use a military-grade gun, you can use that kind of stuff to take somebody out,” then it’s not a big leap to a robot with a bomb.
Lawrence Likar, a professor at LaRoche College in Pittsburgh, said, “I just saw it as a tactical issue: How do you get him out of there? That’s pretty creative from the chief to do that, to think of that.”
Thomas Aveni, a longtime police officer who now serves as executive director for the New Hampshire-based Police Policy Studies Council, said, “I don’t know of any recorded incident in which any robotic device has been used to kill someone, let alone with an explosive.”
Police departments frequently use robots to search buildings. Sometimes they use them to drop a device meant to distract a suspect or to break open part of a door.
Mr. Aveni said the last time he remembered police using an explosive in a way that significantly harmed people was in 1985, when Philadelphia police who were trying to evict armed members of a group called MOVE from a row house dropped an explosive from a helicopter onto a building.
Police ordered firefighters to keep their distances as the resulting fire killed six adults and five children and consumed 61 houses.
Mr. Aveni said he thought the use of a robot and an explosive in the Dallas shootings would likely be legally justifiable.
“From a legal standpoint, deadly force is deadly force,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if we kill someone with a handgun, a rifle, or a shotgun, or if we kill them with a knife, it’s deadly force.”
Policies on deadly force generally vary across departments. Often, they rank threats by level and allow officers to use one level of force above the ones employed by a suspect.
“Under these circumstances, when all else had failed, we had a large body count; we already had 12 officers shot; we already had multiple bystanders injured; and we had a negotiation that was going nowhere, considering the totality of the circumstances ... what the police did was objectively reasonable,” he said.
Still, he wouldn’t be surprised if the robot-bomb combination raises a new debate about whether it’s acceptable to use remote technology to kill someone.
“Under what circumstances do we use remotely controlled devices to kill people?” he asked. “There probably ought to be some general guidelines put down where we do it only when we have no other choice, when all other alternatives have failed.”
The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Rich Lord contributed to this story.
The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Post-Gazette. Liz Navratil is a reporter for the Post-Gazette. Contact Liz Navratil at: lnavratil@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1438, or on Twitter @LizNavratil.
First Published July 9, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
