Knightscope K5 park patrol at Huntington Park Police Department
Municipal police department · Security patrol · Trade press
An independent editorial outlet wrote its own account of this deployment. Numbers still appear exactly as published, and still need verification against your own job.
The job
The Huntington Park Police Department in Los Angeles County leased a Knightscope K5 autonomous security robot, nicknamed HP RoboCop, and deployed it in June 2019 to patrol Salt Lake Park as a continuously roving camera platform intended to support officers remotely. The 400-pound robot records video and can detect and store pedestrian faces, scan license plates, and identify smartphones, with data points cross-referenced against a blacklist to generate alerts for the department.
The agency
not published in the cited accounts; the deployment covered one city park, Salt Lake Park
The equipment
Knightscope K5 autonomous security robot, 400 pounds (reported-by-trade-press)
The published numbers
$6,000 monthly initially budgeted and $8,000 a month currently paid according to invoices obtained by MuckRock (reported-by-trade-press); initial three-year operating budget of $240,000 (reported-by-trade-press); program up for review after one year per city meeting minutes (reported-by-trade-press); deployed June 2019 (reported-by-trade-press); crime outcome figures: not published
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
This deployment is documented mostly by independent journalism rather than agency reporting, and the record is mixed. MuckRock found the department paying $8,000 a month against a $6,000 budget line and found nothing in the documentation indicating what criteria the department would use to add a face, license plate, or smartphone to the blacklist, a governance gap any agency must close in writing before a camera-based patrol robot rolls. On October 4, 2019 a bystander pressed the robot's emergency alert button to report a fight breaking out nearby and the robot failed to respond, an incident logged in the AI Incident Database from contemporaneous news reporting. No published data ties the robot to any crime outcome, and this site does not treat presence as deterrence. A buyer should price the lease against fixed cameras, and put emergency button routing, data retention, and blacklist criteria in the contract before signature.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Describe what your agency is weighing. Abe will give you an honest preliminary assessment, and if a robot or a drone is the wrong answer, he will say so.