This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 21st, 2016, when Dallas

police used a robot packed with explosives to kill an active shooter who'd already killed several people,

it was a first of its kind way of handling a threat.

Matthew Feeney, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, describes some of the implications.

Yeah, so this is widely believed to be the first time that American law enforcement have

used a bomb attached to a robot to kill a suspect.

And the Dallas Police Chief said that they saw no other option but to use the bomb robot.

And this not surprising that in the wake of this death of the shooter that there have been

discussions about use of force and complaints about or discussions about when police

should utilize new technologies like this.

Under most current policies, police are allowed to kill suspects if they suspect that the suspect poses a threat to the officer's life or the lives of members of the public.

And while I think we should be paying attention to the kind of technologies that police use.

I don't necessarily think that we need a new rule just for robots and instead we should focus

our efforts on reducing the number of interactions that police are having face to face with citizens

and also taking steps to make sure that those interactions are safer.

What would be step one to reduce the number of required police interactions.

So I think a good first step would be to think about how new technologies can be used to reduce citizen police interactions.

Many listeners will know that some of the most prominent police

involved shootings over the last couple of years have involved people who are pulled over

in their cars for non-violent routine traffic violation,

whether it's a missing front license plate or a broken tail light.

And with license plate readers and other technologies, it doesn't seem to me obvious that every single traffic violation necessarily

...