Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday he has “another plan” for an NYPD robot that has been sitting in storage in the Times Square subway station since the end of a two-month trial period for the bot last fall — but he declined to explain what he had in mind.
“We have another plan. I want to do with the [Knightscope] K5, I don’t want to roll it out yet,” Adams said during his weekly off-topic news conference. “But we still see a use in robotics and technology, I’m a big believer in this. We have to really see, ‘how do we use robotics and technology to run our city more efficiently?’”
But Adams is up against the clock. There is only about a month left on the city’s contract with Knightscope, the company that makes K5, to lease the robot, according to mayoral spokesperson Charles Lutvak.
When asked by a reporter what the new plans could be for K5 with just a month to go, Lutvak said “we’ll let you know if anything changes.”
Adams insisted investing in technology such as K5 can help fill the gaps in the NYPD’s ranks that have resulted from cops leaving the force in droves in recent years and it being difficult to hire replacements.
“In a law enforcement area, we’re really hurting in manpower,” Adams said. “We should really be concerned about what is happening in the law enforcement area of our cities across America, people no longer want to be in law enforcement.”
The robot stands at 5 feet 3 inches, weighs 400 pounds and resembles a droid from the “Star Wars” movie franchise. The wheeled device has cameras on all sides and a help button that civilians can use to speak with live police officers.
The mayor’s comments come after it was first reported earlier this month that K5 has been unceremoniously gathering dust in a Times Square subway station storefront since the beginning of December, when a pilot program testing the robot in the station ended. The pilot, which began last September, saw K5 making the rounds of the subway station’s mezzanine, accompanied by two live police officers.
The robot came under criticism from civil liberties groups for adding yet another piece of surveillance technology to the NYPD’s arsenal, even though K5 does not have real-time facial recognition capabilities, according to the administration.
Critics of the mayor’s budget cuts have also blasted him for rolling out K5 while simultaneously sounding the alarm about an ongoing fiscal crisis. However, Adams has contended that it only costs $9-an-hour to lease the robot, which he says makes it a financially sound investment.
Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) and a frequent critic of Adams’ use of devices for policing purposes, slammed the idea of redeploying K5 in an emailed statement on Tuesday.
“This hunk of junk will do exactly as much good for New Yorkers out on the streets as it does in a broom closet,” Fox Cahn said. “This experiment has proved just how much money these robots waste, and how little we get in return. As crucial city projects face budget cuts, it’s indefensible that that mayor would consider throwing good money after bad. For months, K5 has shown has the NYPD can use technology to create a cutting edge traffic jam, blocking the already crowded halls of the Times Square Station, but it never stopped a single crime, never kept one person safe.”
