Spot is a four-legged robot made by Boston Dynamics, leased or bought by police forces to enter places officers would rather not: hostage scenes, suspected explosive devices, structurally unsafe buildings, and the aftermath of fires. It is remotely operated rather than autonomous in any meaningful sense — an operator directs where it goes, while onboard software handles the mechanics of walking, balancing and climbing stairs. It weighs around 32kg, and in its policing configuration carries cameras and lighting. An arm attachment allows it to open doors and move objects.

HOW THE COMPANY DESCRIBES IT

Boston Dynamics frames Spot around work that is hazardous or tedious for people. A company spokesperson told Scientific American that Spot has been "particularly resourceful in tackling dull, dirty and dangerous tasks", citing inspecting a bomb, searching the remnants of an explosion or fire, and de-escalating potentially dangerous situations. Responding to the New York controversy, the company said it supported communities reviewing the allocation of public funds and described Spot as a cost-effective tool comparable to robotic devices public safety agencies have long used for hazardous inspection.

The company's public position has consistently been that Spot is not a weapons platform, and its terms prohibit weaponisation.

HOW POLICE HAVE USED IT

The most documented deployment is the New York Police Department's, which leased a Spot in 2020 under a contract worth roughly $94,000 and nicknamed it "Digidog". It was used in a small number of incidents: a home invasion in the Bronx in February 2021, an incident at a Manhattan public housing building, and a hostage situation in which officers strapped food to the robot and sent it in to the location.

The NYPD's operational case was made by John Miller, then deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism. He noted the department had used robots for hazardous response for nearly fifty years, and argued Spot was more agile than its predecessors because it could climb stairs, had better video recording, and was substantially cheaper than existing tracked robots costing between $200,000 and $270,000 depending on model.

WHAT HAPPENED IN NEW YORK, AND WHY IT MATTERS

The deployment collapsed under public and political pressure rather than technical failure. Footage of the robot at a public housing building and at the Bronx incident circulated widely, and critics framed it as emblematic of aggressive policing in poor communities and of the wider militarisation of US police. Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said it was glad the Digidog was "put down", calling it creepy and alienating. Comparisons to the Black Mirror episode Metalhead were common enough to become part of the story.

The procedural failure is the more instructive part. The ACLU pointed out that the NYPD had not included the Digidog on its list of surveillance devices, which the 2020 POST Act required it to disclose. Councilman Ben Kallos and Council Speaker Corey Johnson subpoenaed the department for records relating to the device; in response, officials disclosed that the lease had been terminated on 22 April 2021, four months before it was due to expire.

The technology was not withdrawn because it did not work. It was withdrawn because it was acquired without the disclosure the law required, and because the department had not established public consent for it.

It also did not stay withdrawn. In April 2023 Mayor Eric Adams announced the robot's return as part of a wider fleet, declaring that "Digidog is out of the pound". That reversal is a reminder that public backlash suspends deployments more often than it ends them.

THE CASE FOR IT

The core argument is straightforward and hard to dismiss: sending a machine into a situation that might kill a person is better than sending a person. Bomb disposal, structural collapse, fire scenes and armed standoffs are the clearest examples, and police have used remote robots for exactly this purpose for decades. Spot's contribution is mobility — stairs, rubble, uneven ground — that tracked robots handle poorly, at a lower price point than the machines it replaces.

The hostage-food example is a genuinely useful illustration: a task that would otherwise require a person to approach an armed subject was performed by a machine.

THE CASE AGAINST

The strongest objection is not about the robot's function but about what it signals. A four-legged machine moving through a public housing block reads very differently to the residents of that block than a tracked bomb-disposal unit at a cordon, even where the underlying capability is similar. That perception is not irrational: it reflects a reasonable concern about which neighbourhoods experience new policing technology first.

The disclosure failure is a concrete, documented governance problem rather than a matter of perception. A department subject to a statutory obligation to publish its surveillance technologies did not list this one.

There is also a mission-creep question that the New York record raises directly. The justification offered was hazardous entry, but the deployments that caused the backlash were a home invasion and a public housing incident, neither obviously a bomb-disposal scenario. The gap between the stated use case and the observed use case is the substance of the criticism.

Cost framing cuts both ways. $94,000 is cheap against a $270,000 tracked robot and expensive against nothing at all — and the political argument in New York, made among others by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was that the money should have gone to housing, education or health rather than to policing technology.

WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED

No evaluation of operational effectiveness has been identified for any police Spot deployment. The NYPD used it in a handful of incidents and no published analysis assesses whether outcomes differed from what conventional equipment would have achieved.

The current number of police forces operating Spot is not established. Boston Dynamics told Scientific American that other US departments were testing their own units, but no comprehensive figure has been published.

What data Spot records during a deployment, how long it is retained, and whether it is treated as evidential material or as operational telemetry, is not documented in any source reviewed. For a device that carries cameras into private dwellings, that is a substantial gap.