A standoff between police and the man who carried out in the shootings in Dallas, which left at least five police officers dead, ended after the gunman was killed when a robot delivered and detonated explosives where he was holed up, law enforcement officials said.
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The move represents a potentially unprecedented use of robots to deliberately deliver lethal force in domestic policing, experts say, raising questions about how area law enforcement officials are deploying such high-tech tools.
The Dallas Police Department did not immediately respond to inquiries about the exact robot used in the standoff.
The decision to deliver a bomb by robot stunned some current and former law enforcement officials, who said they believed the new tactic blurred the line between policing and warfare.
"The further we remove the officer from the use of force and the consequences that come with it, the easier it becomes to use that tactic," said Rick Nelson, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council. "It's what we have done with drones in warfare."
"In warfare, your object is to kill," Nelson added. "Law enforcement has a different mission."
Other law enforcement officials supported the Dallas decision and suggested they could take a similar approach if the situation calls for it. New York's police commissioner, William Bratton, speaking at a news conference Friday, said that while he was waiting to find out precisely what the Dallas police did, "we have that capability."
"This is an individual that killed five police officers," he added, referring to the man identified by a Texas law enforcement official as Micah Xavier Johnson, 25. "So God bless 'em."
Aided by federal grants and Defense Department assistance, hundreds of civilian agencies have purchased robots. The military itself is the biggest market for the bomb-disposal robots.
From 2003 to June 2016, government records show, the Defense Department transferred 682 bomb-disposal robots to 241 agencies in 41 states.
A map created by Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone shows at least six such robots in Arkansas municipalities.
Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, who specializes in surveillance and technology issues, said she thought the Dallas blast was the first time U.S. police had intentionally used a lethal robot.
"We already see surveillance robots," Joh said. "But a robot that is capable of harming or killing people is a game changer."
Bomb disposal robots typically work like advanced remote-controlled vehicles, featuring camera feeds that are transmitted back to operators so that they can direct the units in potentially dangerous situations from afar.
"These EOD robots have been used for many things, but this was pretty unusual," said Dan Gettinger, co-director of the center, referring to explosive ordnance disposal robots.
According to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of weapons research group Armament Research Services, robots of the likes used to examine explosive devices and manipulate small objects have been used frequently to deliver different types of explosives to help breach doors or clear obstacles.
Information for this article was contributed by Andrea Peterson and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of The Washington Post; by Michael Doyle and Christopher Huffaker of Tribune News Service; and by Henry Fountain and Michael S. Schmidt of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/09/2016