Good morning. It is Wednesday, July 13. The newest trend in San Francisco is robots acting as security guards. But can they be trusted to keep us safe? A mother says her toddler was knocked down and run over by a robot in Palo Alto. Here's what else is happening in the Golden State:
Protesters marched outside LAPD headquarters before taking to City Hall on Tuesday as the Police Commission found that the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old woman was within the department’s policy. Redel Jones was killed in August 2015 after police say she moved toward an officer with a knife. A witness, however, said Jones was running away at the time she was shot. “Shame on you,” one activist yelled after the commission’s decision. Los Angeles Times
"The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," Tiffany Teng explained to the channel. "He was crying like crazy and he never cries."
Fortunately, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng escaped the baby-on-machine interaction with only a swollen foot a few scrapes, but his parents worry that the K5 could injure other small children. And, in a revelation that makes Thursday's encounter read like the first inklings of a robot uprising in a Isaac Asimov story, we learn that the robot may have struck before. According to Harwin's parents, a human security guard at the mall told them the robot had had a similar encounter previously with another toddler.