One effect of AB 481 is to add local oversight to hardware like the kind obtained through a US Department of Defense program that sends billions of dollars of military equipment such as armored vehicles and ammunition to local police departments. Equipment from the program was used against protesters in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
Earlier this year, San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin amended San Francisco’s draft policy for military-grade police equipment to explicitly forbid use of robots to deploy force against any person. But an amendment
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