Robocop, or the Modern Prometheus: Monsters, Militarization and the boundaries of the post/human.

• In Event: Matters of Violence: Police, Prisons, Ecology

Abstract

July 7, 2016, the Dallas Police Department ended a standoff with gunman Michael Xavier Johnson by killing him with a Remotec Andros Mark V-A1 bomb disposal robot loaded with plastic explosives. While the move was, like drones, lauded by some for keeping the boys in blue out of harms way, for others the event marked a horrific turn in policing toward a decidedly “new bad future”, where technological innovation greatly ratchets up policing’s surveillance and killing power. In The Guardian, for instance, one legal analyst warned that the Dallas case clearly demonstrated the pressing need for a legal framework to govern the lethality of the robot police force, soon to arrive. Drawing the speculative realism of Graham Harman and texts ranging from Shelley to Robocop—this paper offers a critique of “police militarization”, demonstrating how the obsession with certain technologies (rifles, robots, drones) overlooks and normalizes the lethal mandate of the police, which from inception, was designed as an automated killing machine.

Author

• Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University