NYPD's 'Dystopian' Digidog Needs Watchdog's Leash, Advocates Argue

NEW YORK CITY — A watchdog needs to leash the NYPD's "dystopian" police robot Digidog, advocates barked in a searing letter.

Advocates with The Legal Aid Society publicly released a letter Wednesday that argues the NYPD's spring rollout of Digidog and other new police robots violated a surveillance law.

The letter asks the NYPD's inspector general to probe the rollout of Digidog and other robots.

"This is a clear violation of both the letter and the intent of existing law, and we urge the NYPD-OIG to conduct an immediate investigation to hold the police department to their legal obligations," said Shane Ferro, a Legal Aid attorney, in a statement.

An NYPD spokesperson said the most recent audit by the inspector found the department was in compliance with the surveillance law.

"The Department’s disclosures and uses of any technology is consistent with both the law and policy," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The advocates' request is only the latest sign they won't let sleeping (robot) dogs lie.

A clamor by everyday New Yorkers and advocates alike sent the NYPD's first adoption of Digidog — technically, a $75,000-per-pup Boston Dynamics robot dog — to the proverbial pound in 2021.

And that's where Digidog stayed until April, when Mayor Eric Adams held a dog-and-pony show in Times Square to announce that the robot will be back on the force, alongside another egg-shaped automatonnicknamed the "snitchBOT."

Yet again, the prospect of robot police drew a backlash — and one that Adams tried to paint as only a few malcontents howling at progress. (He also defended the FDNY's own robot dog that very publicly fell over while walking through the debris of a Lower Manhattan garage collapse.)

“This is not play time, this is real time," Adams said at the time. "And this is an administration that is not going to be fearful."

Amid this hubbub, NYPD officials behind the scenes were rushing through necessary red tape to get the robots on the streets, contend Legal Aid advocates in their recent letter.

The city's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act — or POST — requires officials to introduce new technologies to the public 90 days before they go into use, the letter argues. The public also has a 45-day comment period to sound off, according to the letter.

Not only did the NYPD do neither of those things, police officials tried to shoehorn the new robots into existing policies that clearly don't apply to them, the letter contends.

"Though many of the technologies are new and differ in impact and use to other surveillance tools already in use by the NYPD, no new Impact and Use Policies were released by the department," the letter states. "Instead, the NYPD inserted scattered references to the new technologies into existing IUPs."

The NYPD's inspector general should investigate the violation of POST, the letter contends.

A spokesperson for the NYPD argued that Digidog and the other robots are simply "enhanced" uses of existing technologies. The NYPD updated its impact and use policies accordingly, the spokesperson said.

"When the underlying functions of several technologies operate in the same manner, any description of those technologies’ capabilities and components will be virtually identical," the spokesperson said in a statement.