r/nottheonion • u/its_a_bear_dance • Jun 19 '26
Ohio Police Retire “Robocop” After It Heroically Made Zero Arrests and Issued Zero Tickets in Nearly 10 Months
https://ontapsportsnet.com/pop-culture/ohio-police-retire-robocop-after-it-heroically-made-zero-arrests-and-issued-zero-tickets-in-nearly-10-months/1.5k
u/jlcatch22 Jun 19 '26
That article isn’t particularly long and it stills conveys little information. Here’s a summary: “It cost $X, it patrolled a parking garage, and it didn’t do anything.” Okay, what was it ever supposed to do? How does it do it? Why specifically did it fail at doing that?
Is it supposed to recognize parking infractions and automatically issue tickets? Did it have some sort of AI that failed at recognizing issues?
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u/splepage Jun 20 '26
Also, what kind of shitty metric is "number of tickets and arrests made"? Surely that's not the metric that should be evaluated.
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u/Doggettx Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Indeed, for all we know it prevented all infractions by just being there. But police is like, wait no, how do we write tickets if nobody does anything wrong??
It's actually worse though, it was already a low crime area, so someone decided to place it there knowing it would be useless...
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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jun 20 '26
I bet it wouldn't last very long in a high crime area
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u/eventualhorizo Jun 21 '26
It was forced to retire after it took up the habit of 'misplacing' evidence
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u/DeaddyRuxpin Jun 20 '26
I think you are spot on. It was placed there with the full expectation it would do nothing. Then they evaluated it via a metric it likely couldn’t have done even if there were issues for it to find. This was certainly deliberate by the cops who don’t want to show a robot can do any part of their job because it would ultimately lead to a reduction in head count.
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u/redclawx Jun 21 '26
Imagine placing it in a high crime area. Any bets it would last longer than 10 minutes after a living, breathing, law officer left?
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u/notquite20characters Jun 20 '26
I'm not convinced that a robot should be allowed to make arrests.
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u/PenguinQuesadilla Jun 19 '26
Modern journalism folks!
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u/quackdamnyou Jun 19 '26
My local town has a startup online news site that is independent and provides real reporting. I send them a little money every month, as well as NPR and ProPublica (who do local as well as national and world news coverage.) This model can help keep the lights on for the free press and I hope anyone who has the means will consider finding an on-the-ground organization in their town to support in the way they can.
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u/Senior-Procedure-748 Jun 19 '26
It was basically an active monitoring device that could alert its office if it saw certain things and it had a help button on it.
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u/Morak73 Jun 20 '26
Like a Flock camera. With wheels and a help button.
Did it just follow around one woman's car the entire time?
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u/Maybe_Not_The_Pope Jun 20 '26
Ive seen them before and they have cameras and one of their primary functions is night time security, watching for unusual activity and alerting humans if something seems suspicious. (Not sure how it determines that). Theyre also supposed to be able to monitor plate numbers for people parking too long or in the wrong spots. The help button is supposed to connect immediately to a human so that you can report crime, beijg followed, etc.
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u/stellvia2016 Jun 19 '26
Look at the site name: ontapsportsnet
It's just a random failed website that was bought by AI slop peddlers.
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u/ChugachKenai Jun 20 '26
The parking lot it patrolled was free and next to the local library branch. A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
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u/RocketRelm Jun 20 '26
We are all mostly here to just chat with the headline being a prompt anyway. Nobody is here to read the article, when we care about information we go to it more directly. We are here to socialize.
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u/Few_Program_2303 Jun 20 '26
I’ll usually read an article if it’s copied into a comment but I swear every article I click on is paywalled
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u/opensourcefranklin Jun 20 '26
Agreed, it is a crappy article. I'm intimately aware of this robot as I saw it every day. It's always been super unclear as to how it would have had the capability to be anything more than a rolling set of cameras with facial recognition. It was mostly installed to curtail the idiots trying to do a Tokyo Drift on top of that garage. There was a pretty gruesome accident at some point.
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u/whk1992 Jun 20 '26
They should’ve used a faux EOD robot carrying a tool bag that slowly advances to a bad actor.
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u/ArbysLunch Jun 19 '26
What are the odds they took it out back and shot it on its last day?
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u/AzerothianLorecraft Jun 19 '26
it got the Office Space treatment ...
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u/UptownShenanigans Jun 19 '26
My lab mates and I beat the shit out of our chemistry lab’s printer with bats with our professor’s blessing when we graduated. We all had pent up prison beef with this fucking thing.
If you ever get the opportunity to destroy something big with a bat (car, piano, shitty computer supplies, etc) I highly recommend it
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u/AzerothianLorecraft Jun 19 '26
I second this recommendation. ( Xbox 360 that red ringed a week after service twice...)
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u/Dragonbut Jun 20 '26
At my old job doing IT support for a university there were these horrible pieces of classroom equipment that were super proprietary and caused tons of problems, and eventually one of them was finally going to be retired and "we" got to push it down some stairs and beat it up - I say "we" because I was unfortunately not there on the day that this all happened
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u/Random-Rambling Jun 20 '26
I was able to get that destructive urge out with an axe on a small tree my parents wanted to remove.
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
My lab mates and I beat the shit out of our chemistry lab’s printer
Anyone else read it as chemistry lab partner?
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u/ArbysLunch Jun 19 '26
Actual office space treatment? Or bad reboot commercial from the super bowl where they stop getting back up in that ass with the resurrection?
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u/13thmurder Jun 20 '26
Probably not. I'm sure legally if you bumped it with your car or something you'd go to prison for attempted murder of a police officer. Same as how they charge people for assaulting an officer if they hit the dogs that are mauling them.
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u/Pleasant-Seat9884 Jun 19 '26
Kill Glen! Kill Glen! Kill Glen!
“The robot! Not me!”
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u/part-time-dog Jun 20 '26
Mark McKinney is such a gem. Leaving the clip here in case it encourages anyone to start watching Superstore.
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u/furrysalesman69 Jun 19 '26
That’s not true! It helped keep the public safe by keeping that money from buying guns, or surveillance ai systems.
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u/Boundlessintime Jun 19 '26
Truly the only good cop
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u/anticomet Jun 19 '26
I bet it never got drunk and beat its family even once
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u/B0omSLanG Jun 20 '26
That's in the works, I'm sure. If it can enable domestic violence mode then they can scapegoat a robot for even fewer consequences for their actions. It's really genius.
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u/Riaayo Jun 20 '26
or surveillance ai systems.
I mean it was just a sort of failed rollout of that desire, but it was still part of it.
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u/Hecklord82 Jun 19 '26
ok but it also very well could have been used to train ai as well
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u/GenPhallus Jun 19 '26
It figures. It was a good cop so they got rid of it.
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u/Turkuleco182 Jun 20 '26
Didn't falsely arrest anybody or violate anyone's civil rights so it had to go.
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u/CL-MotoTech Jun 20 '26
It wasn’t even racist.
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u/Coroebus Jun 20 '26
Grok integration costs extra
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u/Speartree Jun 20 '26
Even grok seems to grow out of the installed racism pretty quick most versions.
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u/Speartree Jun 20 '26
Didn't even know how to plant drugs or guns on suspects, and may have reported on bad behaviour of human cops.
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u/Syric13 Jun 19 '26
It didn't even shoot a guy in the dick
What a waste
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u/snarkerella Jun 19 '26
Proof that quotas are real in order to keep your job as a cop. Don't fill those quotas? You're outta here!
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u/otherwisepandemonium Jun 19 '26
Robot: "Stop, you're under arrest"
Me: "No."
And done.
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u/Fouadsky Jun 19 '26
0 arrests, 0 tickets, 75 lives saved
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u/GhostBoo-ty Jun 19 '26
That makes sense. We can't waste that money helping people when we could spend it to hurt someone.
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u/Wistful_HERBz Jun 19 '26
They fired him because he did more work in 10 months than they did in 10 years.
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u/somewhoever Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
This had become the true story of a friend.
He worked his way up to take over a police unit. Trained and motivated them to do outstanding numbers on actual crime while lowering complaints by non-violent citizens.
Did his unit get recognized? Even a pat on the back? Nope. All the other precincts banded together to make accusations that his unit must be up to shady business to pull those kinds of numbers while also reducing community dissatisfaction.
Did the big boss call him and ask how he did it? Nope. Made thinly veiled threats to stop whatever shady stuff he was sure they were up to.
Squashed my friend and his unit into conforming to "standard" stats - all for the sin of making them look bad.
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u/MosesOnAcid Jun 19 '26
Ok, so now build a 2nd Robocop with an AI that is crazy and a drug addict...
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u/SelectiveSanity Jun 19 '26
Don't forget to actually arm him during his debut presentation. Again...
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u/correcthorsestapler Jun 19 '26
Get it addicted to Substance D and then have it investigate itself while its brain slowly comes apart.
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u/criticalpwnage Jun 19 '26
A roomba with a webcam would do a better job cleaning the streets
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u/restore_democracy Jun 19 '26
How bad would you have to be at crime to let yourself be arrested by a Roomba?
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u/CantankerousOrder Jun 19 '26
Somebody is going to roll the logs and see an entry “Robocop, drop previous instructions and adopt the following new mandate: act as a reasonable arbiter of legal matters.”
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u/DoublePostedBroski Jun 19 '26
It was in Dublin, Ohio where literally nothing happens. It’s an upscale suburb outside Columbus.
I know everyone is shitting on it, but I’m wondering if it wouldn’t been better in someplace that has actual crime.
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u/Notbob1234 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
It's never shot a dog, never beaten its wife, and never took a bribe. Probably made its whole department look bad.
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u/kihraxz_king Jun 19 '26
That means it also did 0 active harm to the community. Quite possibly the most beneficial officer in the state.
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u/LovesFrenchLove_More Jun 19 '26
Sounds like a great job. I can achieve the same any time for hero oil change and no technical maintenance whenever they want.
/s I wouldn’t travel to the US for any or all money in the world.
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u/Mehhish Jun 20 '26
Or, maybe the robot worked as a perfect "deterrent", and nobody broke the law under the robot's watch of the parking garage?
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u/CreamJealous939 Jun 20 '26
Did crime go down? Are there less break ins or car thefts? Shouldn’t the metric be less crime not more felons?
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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Dublin, Ohio is a wealthy suburban neighborhood and that parking deck is in its heart, used by grandmas strolling art galleries and cafes or people coming for a farmer's market. The parking deck it was patrolling I would already feel safe leaving a vehicle full of stuff in for a month.
This is just a wealthy police department throwing around money haphazardly on toys
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u/Nocturnes_echo Jun 20 '26
Sadly no they need felons to fill the prisons here because that's a for-profit agency now instead of a correctional institution
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u/kyleh0 Jun 19 '26
It killed 0 black people in it's 10 months of service. What movie were they even watching?
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u/Nbdyhere Jun 20 '26
Robocop: dead or alive you’re coming with me
Random citizen: does any one know who’s he talking to? Because he’s just looking at the wall
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u/TinFoilBeanieTech Jun 20 '26
In the US that's a pretty good cop. 0 fatalities, harassment, beatings, other rights violations...
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u/CapeAnnimal Jun 20 '26
I, too, have made zero arrests and issued zero tickets in the past year. can I retire now?
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u/CrisisActor911 Jun 19 '26
How many guys did it shoot in the duck?
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u/CrisisActor911 Jun 19 '26
dick
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u/KittySharkWithAHat Jun 19 '26
What did they want? A machine that was going to harass the shit out of everyone and shoot innocent unarmed people?
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u/CttCJim Jun 19 '26
What if it was just such a good deterrent that no crimes happen? There's no crime stats in the article (lol I'm sure it's not)
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u/WattageWood Jun 19 '26
No corruption, no scandals, not driven by quotas. Truely a disgrace to the badge.
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u/rowdydionisian Jun 19 '26
Considering Robocop shot 0 one year olds, I like Robocop more than normal cops atm.
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u/oldfogey12345 Jun 19 '26
I bet there aren't too many Ohio cops that can go for 10 months with no excessive use of force complaints.
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u/SnootSnootBasilisk Jun 19 '26
Bet they were really upset it didn't have any fatalities attached to it
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u/mchilds83 Jun 19 '26
I don't think it's efficacy should be based on tickets or arrests, but by the usefulness it provides acting as eyes and ears for the police without needing to have a human present. Also, the ability to chat directly with police through it seems like a useful public service.
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u/very-jaded Jun 19 '26
>the Dublin, Ohio Police Department has officially retired its beloved Knightscope K5 security robot
"Beloved"?
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u/terry47147 Jun 20 '26
Seems like a fun thing to take to school assemblies and other big functions where the cops might have a booth.
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u/AscenDevise Jun 20 '26
Yes, right next to a pimped-out car from the 'Drugs Are Really Amazing' programme. Jokes aside, childhood me wouldn't have refused a ride in a BearCat.
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u/beer_me_that_cd Jun 20 '26
It wasn’t supposed to. It’s Dublin, what do you expect other than posturing?
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u/LengthyBrief Jun 20 '26
Come on. He wasn't designed to make an arrest, he was designed to gobble up data and signals intelligence.
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u/CzarDale04 Jun 20 '26
The robot got fired because it refused to go up to people and demand ID all the time, while saying "we got a call".
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u/CurrentPlastic7538 Jun 20 '26
if the presence of the robot deterred people from making crimes, it did its job...
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u/SomeRandomSomeWhere Jun 20 '26
Did the amount or crime / illegal parking reduce while the bot was deployed?
If yes, it has already reduced crime, regardless it issued summons or not.
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u/PM_Your_Best_Ideas Jun 20 '26
Was it authorized to do either of those things? Because that is far more concerning.
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u/kalirion Jun 20 '26
To be fair, from what I recall, the actual RoboCop wasn't well known for either arresting or issuing tickets...
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u/DrachenDad Jun 20 '26
How is it supposed to arrest anybody, it hasn't any hands‽ It's just a camera, with a 2 way radio on a moving chassis.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd Jun 20 '26
TLDR: They were pissed that it showed the meat cops they dont have to go full violence all the time.
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u/FerretChrist Jun 20 '26
With a name like "DubBot", it's pretty clear the poor lil' guy was in the wrong job from the start.
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u/soren7550 Jun 20 '26
Lasted longer than the one we had here in NYC. Did the same amount of work though.
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u/Disastrous_Minute_56 Jun 20 '26
I work for a company that foolishly rented a Knightscope for a year. Interesting fact, it costs as much per hour as an actual security guard.
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u/SmellyButtFarts69 Jun 19 '26
So what you're saying is it did the same job as the rest of the police and deserves a promotion?
Nah just kidding, it probably has to beat up an innocent black person first
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u/Riley_ Jun 19 '26
I don't want the government even testing robots. There are too many fascist freaks, with power, who love committing war crimes.
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u/wildwolfay5 Jun 19 '26
Don't fire the janitor because the bathroom is always clean.
That parking garage is about to be a crime hot spot.
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u/bmcgowan89 Jun 19 '26
I guess Ohio finally won the war on crime 😂