KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - A sight previously thought to be science fiction is very real at a southeast Kansas City shopping center. Instead of a police officer, a security robot has been patrolling sidewalks and shoppers are taking notice.
Since Marshall the robot has been on the job, shoppers say the experiences have completely changed when they come to these stores. The robot can spend 23 hours a day monitoring the parking lot from all angles which gives people a new sense of protection and ease they don’t always have when out.
Marshall took over security at Brywood Centre in April. Before that, Karen White noticed a lot of trouble outside the shopping center.
“Sometimes it’d be concerning for your car like someone could take it or something,” White said.
Knowing now that Marshall is always watching, the risk of crime does not worry her or others as much.
“It made it very better, like you can’t be in the parking lot without seeing the robot,” White continued. “So, I think it scared them off.”
They feel like there is less crime, because they have bought into security theater.
Ironically security theater can have a a placebo effect on crime rates as well. It turns out that the likelihood that someone commits a crime is strongly correlated to the chance they believe they will get caught, not the actual chance of getting caught. That’s why fake security cameras are so effective.
Hate to say it (re: security theater), but I think that is correct. I’ve read articles stating a drop in crime in places where they just have a cardboard cutout of police officers in the window.
“It is not the severity of punishment that deters crime, but the certainty of punishment.”
Bullocks. You could make the crime for stealing death and execute everyone who does. There would still be stealing.
Simply put most criminals don’t think about consequences.
Bro this is an advert paid by the robot vendor… hence why we are going based on “feelz”
People still act like a fake news article is good faith behavior when it is just low quality engagement slop to drive somebody’s sales lol
Report to mods? That would work, until the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that… Damn fake news is gonna get us all killed (literally, as in climate change), but at least then after everyone dies perhaps we’ll learn something from the ordeal. Wait… I might have detected a small problem with this plan (to do nothing at all, and just let it happen).
I’m pretty sure that simply putting a picture of eyes in the scene reduces theft. People are emotional creatures , and if they feel like they’re being watched by someone who doesn’t approve of stealing, they’re more likely to refrain.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
Realistically, with the robot having been around now almost six months, I’m more willing to consider that the locals have noticed a difference in their experience going shopping. That’s more than enough time to notice the kind of changes the locals appear to have experienced since they stopped relying on the police.
Last time, it didn’t go so well for the robot:
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-robot-k5-falls-into-water
“He has a license plate reader, he has facial recognition, he can read IP addresses from your cell phone or watch,” Amanda Bellemere, owner of Brywood Shopping Centre, explained. “He knows who you are basically.”
Depends on what your cell or watch is broadcasting publicly and if you are connected to the store wifi.
Yea, no, the most likely route is to pickup a MAC address and associate it with an existing assigned IP address (If that device is connected to the public WiFi, but who even does that these days lol), but modern day Android and iOS randomize MAC addresses on every connection these days by default.
And then you’d still need to correlate that to the physical world, most likely route would be detecting Bluetooth hostname, but it’s by no means guaranteed that the device hostname in the public WiFi DHCP table matches the BT one (phones can have different names for each). And again is dependent on the person being connected to store WiFi to begin with. Would also be entirely thwarted of a person’s BT is off which is highly likely
It’s possible, but would be a useless feature to develop and maintain as it would probably actually work out in the real world like maybe 30% of the time.
Unless they shoved a full stingray unit in it or something (extremely unlikely), this is just a statement from someone parroting a sales brochure that they didn’t entirely understand
Marshall…?
WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL IT MALL-E?!
WHY?!
