Shout out to arguably the world’s most ethical — and laziest — robot cop. After less than a year on the job, it helped make zero arrests and issued zero tickets.
Its operators, unsurprisingly, have run out of patience. The Columbus Dispatch reports that the Dublin Police Department retired its mechanical crimefighter, nicknamed “DubBot,” last month, after the Ohio city euphemistically determined that it wasn’t meeting its operational needs, according to a spokesperson.
The oversized-traffic-cone-if-it-swallowed-a-giant-egg shaped machine is a K5 autonomous security robot built by Knightscope, a California-based firm. At a little over five feet in height and weighing some 400 pounds, it has no limbs to speak of and rolls around on two wheels, leading to comparisons to the Daleks from the “Doctor Who” franchise.
It’s not exactly “RoboCop,” but it’s supposed to help prevent crime by watching everything with its 360-degree video cameras, and providing citizens an emergency call button. For this skullduggery-stopping potential, the city paid $67,548, which is in the rough ballpark as what your average cop probably makes annually.
It was put on an easy beat, tasked with patrolling a local parking garage in July 2025. Still, it didn’t do a whole lot: on top of not leading to any arrests, criminal cases, or tickets, the robot also never spotted any incidents requiring a human police response, according to the department spokesperson.
The city was pretty close to blowing even more money on its clumsy crimefighter, too. It originally planned to pay Knightscope $238,440 to deploy two robots in Dublin for two years, but the second robot was never rolled out. (The police department actually spent $128,080 on the single robot, but it’s receiving a $60,533 reimbursement from Knightscope.)
This isn’t the first time the Knightscope robot has gotten the axe. In fact, the company’s bots seem to mostly make headlines for sucking at their jobs and wasting tax payer money. Disgraced New York City mayor Eric Adams signed a deal to deploy the K5 bots in the city’s subway system in 2023, but they were retired months later after proving to be so useless that they required human cops to constantly chaperone them.
Last month, another Knightscope robot, this one tasked with patrolling the San Antonio International Airport, was dropped because of an onslaught of technical difficulties, like not being able to move in a straight line or provide employees with a working live video and audio feed.
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