Car-buyers are starting to warm to hand-off driver assistance, ever so slowly, but it’s already starting to come for the people who spend the most time behind the wheel — professional drivers, whether in trucks or taxis. But there’s another genre of job, one that spends much of its time driving, that’s evaded being the target of the autonomous revolution: Cops, who often spend hours cruising or idling just waiting for some kind of crime to happen. Now, though, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office is marrying policing and autonomy with a pilot program to loose an autonomous police car on the jurisdiction’s streets. There’s just one problem: It’s built to be an autonomous car, not an autonomous cop.
The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department calls the new project PUG, according to CBS News, for Police Unmanned Ground. It appears Miami’s famed sky-cops are safe from autonomy for now. The vehicle itself is a Ford Explorer kitted out with an autonomy suite, thermal imaging, a 360-degree camera, and a drone. It will reportedly be upgraded with license plate scanners at some point, which would theoretically make it capable of automatically issuing parking tickets, but until then its actual cop capabilities (copabilities) are sort of… nothing.
Not really a cop
The PUG can look around Miami, sure, but according to Axios it’s not really qualified to do much else. It can’t issue tickets, catch speeders, or play TikToks on a subway platform — even its routes will be pre-planned, making it the first ever real-life NPC car to drive in endless loops. Its creators bragged that it’ll soon be equipped with a means of contacting live police officers, which means it’ll be almost as convenient as dialing 911 on your phone. The big capability here seems to be “presence in the community,” which is to say that it’ll act as a crime deterrent by simply being visibly a cop car.
Thus, this entire autonomy project is doing the same job as a parked cop car. Or a broken cop car. Except that, here, people nearby can be sure that there’s no live cop inside — the PUG’s thick coating of autonomy sensors isn’t exactly hard to pick out of a lineup. While the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department didn’t pay for this pilot model, other precincts looking to get their hands on a PUG will have to spend six figures for the privilege. Is this really the best way for cops to spend $200,000? I have to imagine there’s something — anything — better to spend that cash on than an empty car.
