KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - A sight previously thought to be science fiction is very real at a southeast Kansas City shopping center. Instead of a police officer, a security robot has been patrolling sidewalks and shoppers are taking notice.
Since Marshall the robot has been on the job, shoppers say the experiences have completely changed when they come to these stores. The robot can spend 23 hours a day monitoring the parking lot from all angles which gives people a new sense of protection and ease they don’t always have when out.
Marshall took over security at Brywood Centre in April. Before that, Karen White noticed a lot of trouble outside the shopping center.
“Sometimes it’d be concerning for your car like someone could take it or something,” White said.
Knowing now that Marshall is always watching, the risk of crime does not worry her or others as much.
“It made it very better, like you can’t be in the parking lot without seeing the robot,” White continued. “So, I think it scared them off.”
Statements to justify an orwellian mindset. Wouldn’t have thought otherwise.
They feel like there is less crime, because they have bought into security theater.
* sees robot. looks around. *
Average idiot: Huh. No crime in sight. Guess it’s working.
Ironically security theater can have a a placebo effect on crime rates as well. It turns out that the likelihood that someone commits a crime is strongly correlated to the chance they believe they will get caught, not the actual chance of getting caught. That’s why fake security cameras are so effective.
Hate to say it (re: security theater), but I think that is correct. I’ve read articles stating a drop in crime in places where they just have a cardboard cutout of police officers in the window.
It could also just have been a hot August, leading people to feel lethargic and steal less than they did earlier in the year? (How reliable do we think this data actually is btw?)
It make sense, when you make a decision you make it based on the data you have not the truth. So security theaters are effective as long as people who are thinking about commiting a crime think it is working. And they care about getting caught.
Like the ADT signs people get off of Craigslist.
NRA stickers are probably way more effective.
Bro this is an advert paid by the robot vendor… hence why we are going based on “feelz”
People still act like a fake news article is good faith behavior when it is just low quality engagement slop to drive somebody’s sales lol
Report to mods? That would work, until the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that… Damn fake news is gonna get us all killed (literally, as in climate change), but at least then after everyone dies perhaps we’ll learn something from the ordeal. Wait… I might have detected a small problem with this plan (to do nothing at all, and just let it happen).
Realistically, with the robot having been around now almost six months, I’m more willing to consider that the locals have noticed a difference in their experience going shopping. That’s more than enough time to notice the kind of changes the locals appear to have experienced since they stopped relying on the police.
I’m pretty sure that simply putting a picture of eyes in the scene reduces theft. People are emotional creatures , and if they feel like they’re being watched by someone who doesn’t approve of stealing, they’re more likely to refrain.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
Yeah, if you believe the center owner the robot was apparently purchased because of unreliable security staff that were also providing eyes on the scene.
Are you suggesting that the same amount of crime is happening but they’re deciding not to report it because there’s a robot there? That’s the measure they’re touting, the reduction in crime reports.
I live in Kansas City. Somebody is going to do a drive by on that thing.
Same. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet
Intentionally or it will get caught up in one unintentionally?
Either way: “yes”. :-(
So do I, and yes, that could happen.
However, according to the article, it’s been around six months now and is having a positive effect.
“He has a license plate reader, he has facial recognition, he can read IP addresses from your cell phone or watch,” Amanda Bellemere, owner of Brywood Shopping Centre, explained. “He knows who you are basically.”
he can read IP addresses from your cell phone or watch
(X) Doubt
They mean the Bluetooth MAC address. It’ll capture your phone’s and can tell who the manufacturer is but the rest of the address is randomized. That said, lots of watches/earbuds/assorted smart Bluetooth things aren’t randomized because manufacturers are lazy.
Depends on what your cell or watch is broadcasting publicly and if you are connected to the store wifi.
Yea, no, the most likely route is to pickup a MAC address and associate it with an existing assigned IP address (If that device is connected to the public WiFi, but who even does that these days lol), but modern day Android and iOS randomize MAC addresses on every connection these days by default.
And then you’d still need to correlate that to the physical world, most likely route would be detecting Bluetooth hostname, but it’s by no means guaranteed that the device hostname in the public WiFi DHCP table matches the BT one (phones can have different names for each). And again is dependent on the person being connected to store WiFi to begin with. Would also be entirely thwarted of a person’s BT is off which is highly likely
It’s possible, but would be a useless feature to develop and maintain as it would probably actually work out in the real world like maybe 30% of the time.
Unless they shoved a full stingray unit in it or something (extremely unlikely), this is just a statement from someone parroting a sales brochure that they didn’t entirely understand
I suspect it works a lot ore than 30%
As you mentioned, cell ID is there too. Pretty easy to simply capture IMSI data (don’t even have to do anything, phones are alway broadcasting their ID).
Combine IMSI, BT, MAC, date/time, and boy you’ve got one helluva surveillance device.
Add in BT headphones, watches, etc, and you have even more data points to associate.
I wouldn’t be shopping there just because of that.
Actually, no. Phones don’t always broadcast their IMSI. Most of the time they broadcast a Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI) and only on a location update (For power conservation). Your cell provider knows your IMSI already and uses a TMSI for updates for the express purpose of privacy and security for these exact scenarios
It is part of the initial work flow of a Stingray device to attempt to force your device to disconnect from the network and get it to rebroadcast its actual IMSI. But it is not floating around in the air all the time and it certainly isn’t trivial to grab.
BT is really the only viable option, and even that can vary wildly depending on manufacturer.
Does it have a stingray inside? wtf?
You don’t need a stingray to simply pickup cell broadcast which has the ID in it. Technically your phone is doing this, as the tower you connect to has an ID.
Shoplifter: fuck you police toaster!
Police toaster: you jerk off to incest hentai.
Closer to this.
Marshall conquer and destroy! Exterminate!
Does kind of look like one, doesn’t it?
This is not war this is pest control
Scrolled too far to find this
“very better”? Anyway…
It won’t last. Right now it’s new, but ultimately it will become an actual initiation ritual to knock it down, or perhaps a harder version to steal something out from under its nose. It doesn’t know who you are if you wear a mask (or stay out of its line or sight) and don’t carry something broadcasting your IP.
This looks like just security theater.
Meanwhile, aren’t cameras cheap? If let’s say hundreds of those were sprinkled around, maybe behind an opaque substance so you could also put up 10-100x more of them but 9/10ths being fake, and you swap them around occasionally, that might not be perfect either but could work better than a robot offering a nice, easy, fun target to play with, just like in video games. (Nobody ever enjoys video games these days though, do they?)
Be hilarious to put the thing up somewhere it can’t get down from.
It’ll happen. Oh uh, I assume, I mean, yeah, totally that’s what I mean… :-P
“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”
TBH, I trust a security robot way, way more than I trust the KCPD at this point.
Our police are state-controlled and don’t seem to give a damn about locals, and they’ve shown themselves to be completely inept to stem the stream of burglaries and theft that’s occurred in the city over the past year. My own car got ripped off less than a year ago, forcing me to have to replace a window, but that’s small potatoes compared to what many others are experiencing.
Police don’t prevent crime - their job is the grab people who commit crime.
Prevention is a much more complex issue (cultural).
Even as kids we all did shit our parents told us not to, and we just tried to not get caught.
I’ve made similar points in the past in discussions about robot soldiers going to war. There’s an upside to these things that people insist on overlooking; they follow their programming. If you program a robot soldier to never shoot at an ambulance, then it will never shoot at an ambulance even if it’s having a really bad day. Same here, if the security robot has been programmed never to leave the public sidewalk then it’ll never leave the public sidewalk.
It’s always possible for these sorts of things to be programed to do the wrong things, of course. But at least now we have the ability to audit that sort of thing.
The robot can spend 23 hours a day monitoring the parking lot from all angles
Do they get a mandated one-hour break or something?
Charging maybe? A robot’s gotta eat too.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have removable batteries it could recharge and swap out on the fly?
Easier to be automated, like a Roomba.
A mall isn’t open 24hr a day, and I’m sure they know when the least riskiest hour is, probably like a couple hours before opening.
I mean, maybe that hour is a human swapping batteries and giving it a light cleaning?
You joke, but presumably that’s when it recharges.
Remember the movie “Chopping Mall” ?
The headline makes it sound like people are scared to report crimes because they don’t want to talk to RoboMallCop.
Removed by mod
It was just a matter of time, we’ve had automated vacuum cleaners for ages now.
Putting guns on them is a bit harder, you definitely want a well-tested system for that. But cameras is pretty easy.
you definitely want a well-tested system for that.
Just slap an LLM on it. /s
Just like Robocop, right? 😆
