Hollywood may have had RoboCop, but the real world now has a robot more attuned to the prosaic realities of the street.
The Bum Bot.
That is what Rufus Terrill calls the rolling, remote-controll
"This is actually the Bum Bot 2000," Terrill gently corrected on a recent evening as he switched on the device.
The Bum Bot, like the homeless it polices, is a creature of hand-me-downs. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the elderly; the PA system is a walkie-talkie wired to a home-alarm speaker. The rotating turret is an old Cajun meat smoker.
The cylindrical smoker gives the Bum Bot its R2-D2ish profile. But its black armor -- made of exercise mats -- and the stenciled letters spelling out SECURITY lend it a menacing air.
An infrared camera and a 2-million-candl
Using a twin-joystick remote, Terrill usually sends his robot up the street to the parking lot of a day-care center, where a sketchy, drug-dealing crowd congregates after dark. The police sometimes round them up, Terrill says, but soon, it seems, they are back on the street.
So Terrill speaks to them through the Bum Bot, transmitting his voice via walkie-talkie: Move along, he tells the loiterers, or get wet.
Sometimes he tells them that he's capturing them on video: the Bum Bot's camera feeds into a big-screen TV back at his pub, giving patrons a hyper-local dose of reality TV. The street people tend to run away. "It scares the bejesus out of 'em," Terrill said, smiling.
His home-grown strategy for making the neighborhood safer is the latest manifestation of a lingering controversy that has engulfed this prized patch of real estate.
The perpetrators, he says, are the residents of the massive emergency homeless shelter nearby at Peachtree and Pine streets. Terrill says the shelter attracts the kind of people who have broken into his bar, O'Terrill's, and harassed and mugged his neighbors and clients.
Known as Peachtree and Pine, the shelter has amassed other critics, including the administration of Mayor Shirley Franklin, a Democrat whose father was temporarily homeless.
Debi Starnes, the mayor's policy advisor on homelessness, said the shelter, which can accommodate 1,000 people per night, is too big to be properly managed. She also said it fails to adequately help the homeless make the transition to a better life.
This year, the city cut off its funding of the shelter, which is run by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. However, the shelter carries on with a mix of other public and private funds. In fact, it is in the midst of a multi- million-dollar renovation of its historic, 95,000-square-f
Anita Beaty, the task force's executive director, said the shelter is misunderstood. She says it provides employment referrals, mental health counseling and other services. The problem, she says, is that local government has not come to grips with the magnitude of its homeless problem. Beaty's group estimates that as many as 68,000 people in the metro area are homeless in any given year.
(The city estimates that there were about 2,700 "unsheltered" homeless people last year in Atlanta and the urban counties of Fulton and DeKalb.)
Beaty says local governments do not maintain enough shelter space for all the homeless. This, she says, is the last place for them to go.
Beaty is also convinced that the city is trying to move the homeless off Peachtree Street, Atlanta's signature thoroughfare. The city has plans for a sweeping aesthetic makeover of Peachtree: Business boosters have talked about a Georgia version of Paris' Champs-Elysees.
"The emphasis has always been on beautifying Peachtree to get rid of those poor homeless people, to get them out of town," Beaty said. "We say there's no way to do that. It's just inhumane and silly."
Beaty said the Bum Bot doesn't help matters: "Not everybody outside our building is a drug dealer, and when they are, we want them arrested as much as [Terrill]. A robot is not the way to solve anything."
But Terrill said the robot has done a good job scaring off the law-breakers. On a recent Wednesday evening, he ambled toward the day-care parking lot with his creation rolling along at his side. When he arrived about 11:30 p.m., the lot was empty.
(Later, however, after he packed up the robot, dozens of men would swarm the place, hooting after passing vehicles.)
Terrill, an engineer who has designed weapons systems for the military, says he is targeting the people who are causing trouble, not the ones trying to get ahead. He has no problem with those people. In fact, he says, he has employed about 70 men from the shelter at his bar over the years.
But overall, he says, the shelter is doing more harm than good. He believes the nonprofit keeps it on Peachtree just to keep the issue of homelessness in people's faces.
"It needs to go," he said.
Terrill said he consulted the police before rolling out his robot about six months ago. At first, he wanted to arm it with a stun gun or paint gun. "But they said if I shot someone I could technically be charged with assault," he said.
Meanwhile, back at home, Terrill has worked up plans for a Bum Bot 3000.
This model, he said, would used compressed air to shoot netting at people who refused to move on. But he's afraid that, too, could land him in trouble.
"I'd be in jail faster than the bums would," he said. Anyway, he added, "I'm not into capture. I'm into dispersal."
Spy-In-The-Sky Drone Sets Sights on Miami
MIAMI - Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.
A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and “staring” using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to make its debut soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades.
If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.
“Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes,” said police department spokesman Juan Villalba.
“We intend to use this to benefit us in carrying out our mission,” he added, saying the wingless Honeywell aircraft, which fits into a backpack and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, seems ideally suited for use by SWAT teams in hostage situations or dealing with “barricaded subjects.”
Miami-Dade police are not alone, however.
Taking their lead from the U.S. military, which has used drones in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, law enforcement agencies across the country have voiced a growing interest in using drones for domestic crime-fighting missions.
Known in the aerospace industry as UAVs, for unmanned aerial vehicles, drones have been under development for decades in the United States.
The CIA acknowledges that it developed a dragonfly-sized
And other advanced work on robotic flyers has clearly been under way for quite some time.
“The FBI is experimenting with a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Marcus Thomas, an assistant director of the bureau’s Operational Technology Division.
“At this point they have been used mainly for search and rescue missions,” he added. “It certainly is an up-and-coming technology and the FBI is researching additional uses for UAVs.”
SAFETY, PRIVACY CONCERNS
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been flying drones over the Arizona desert and southwest border with Mexico since 2006 and will soon deploy one in North Dakota to patrol the Canadian border as well.
This month, Customs and Border Protection spokesman Juan Munoz Torres said the agency would also begin test flights of a modified version of its large Predator B drones, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, over the Gulf of Mexico.
Citing numerous safety concerns, the FAA — the government agency responsible for regulating civil aviation — has been slow in developing procedures for the use of UAVs by police departments.
“You don’t want one of these coming down on grandma’s windshield when she’s on her way to the grocery store,” said Doug Davis, the FAA’s program manager for unmanned aerial systems.
He acknowledged strong interest from law enforcement agencies in getting UAVs up and running, however, and said the smaller aircraft particularly were likely to have a “huge economic impact” over the next 10 years.
Getting clearance for police and other civilian agencies to fly can’t come soon enough for Billy Robinson, chief executive of Cyber Defense Systems Inc, a small start-up company in St. Petersburg, Florida. His company makes an 8-pound (3.6 kg) kite-sized UAV that was flown for a time by police in Palm Bay, Florida, and in other towns, before the FAA stepped in.
“We’ve had interest from dozens of law enforcement agencies,” said Robinson. “They (the FAA) are preventing a bunch of small companies such as ours from becoming profitable,” he said.
Some privacy advocates, however, say rules and ordinances need to be drafted to protect civil liberties during surveillance operations.
“There’s been controversies all around about putting up surveillance cameras in public areas,” said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Technological developments can be used by law enforcement in a way that enhances public safety,” he said. “But every enhanced technology also contains a threat of further erosion of privacy.”
