A police robot told a woman to go away after she tried to report a violent brawl breaking out nearby – then trundled off while singing a song. Cogo Guebara rushed over to the motorized police officer and pushed its emergency alert button on seeing the brawl break out in Salt Lake Park, Los Angeles, last month. But instead of offering assistance, the egg-shaped robot, whose official name is HP RoboCop, barked at Guebara to ‘Step out of the way’. To add insult to injury, the high-tech device then rolled away while humming an ‘intergalactic tune’, pausing periodically to say ‘Please keep the park clean.’ Guebara told NBC News: ‘I was pushing the button but it said, “Step out of the way.”
‘It just kept ringing and ringing, and I kept pushing and pushing.’ The concerned bystander thought the five-foot tall robot might have needed to see her face before it began to work, so she crouched down in front of its camera.
But the egg-shaped device still didn’t work, forcing Guebara to call 911 on her phone instead. Officers from the Huntington Park Police Department cops finally arrived 15 minutes later, after the row had ended. It left one woman with a bad head wound which saw her stretchered into an ambulance and taken to hospital for emergency treatment. Local Police Chief Cosme Lozano says the robots, which cost between $60,000 and $70,000 a year to lease, are still in a trial phase and that their alert buttons have not yet been activated. He said that law enforcement have not yet started advertising the robots crime-fighting activities. Any help requests are currently sent to a company called Knightscope, which creates and leases the robots. Lozano added that once the robot completes its trial, calls made using its alert button will be sent straight to dispatch. Other versions of the same model have previously hit the headlines after one fell into a fountain in Washington DC. And a third HP RoboCop struck a child while patrolling a mall in California’s Silicon Valley.