Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun'
Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had 'ghost gun"
Two juveniles were arrested in San Francisco's Richmond District after a Waymo detected a firearm violation and pulled over. Police found a loaded AR-style assault rifle, suspected marijuana, and mace. The incident occurred early on Sept. 3, and the investigation remains open. Waymo has previously reported riders to police, including a July case where teens were drinking and shooting toy guns.
The company pulled the car over after detecting a 'violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,' the spokesperson said.
- Animats
There's no reference to a "ghost gun" in the LA Times text. It's only in the headline. In the text, the weapon is referred to as an AR-15. SFGATE, though, quotes cops as saying "AR-styled assault rifle also known as a ghost gun.”
The "ghost gun" thing refers to guns without serial numbers. For an AR-15, that usually means something assembled from an "80% lower receiver", a part which exists purely to evade US gun laws. [1] It's not quite complete; it takes some final machining. This can be done by hand with modest machine shop tools, or there's a special-purpose 3-axis CNC mill to do it for $4000, available from Ghost Gunner.[2] (They used to sell a simpler device for $1200 which was only useful for the single task of finishing "80% lower receivers", but the current $4000 unit is halfway respectable as a desktop CNC mill. It understands a subset of G-Code. Nobody seems to use it for general CNC work, though. A good desktop CNC mill for $4000 would be useful, but they'd need to get serious about cooling and chip removal.)
[1] https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/gunsmithing/building-a-gho...
- kelnos
I'm really torn on this.
This particular situation, at face value at least, sounds like a good outcome. Kids had a gun, someone noticed, called police, situation handled without escalation or violence or something tragic happening.
But this doesn't generalize. Another incident described in the article was when some kids were drinking in the car and shooting toy guns. What if they hadn't been drinking? What if they were just holding toy guns, innocently going from one kid's house to another? What if Waymo thought the guns were real, called the cops, and the cops screwed up and shot one of the kids? These sorts of escalations aren't imaginary; they happen, and they end in tragedy.
The article is also a little cagey on how this "detection" happened. Was it a human spot checking cameras in vehicles? I doubt it. Most likely it was some sort of computer vision algorithm that flagged something. Perhaps a human was in the loop to verify and be the one to call the cops, but humans seem to be increasingly shutting off their brains and trusting the machine. (I recall a recent incident where someone was wrongfully arrested because one of the companies that run the license-plate reader machines flagged their car as stolen. The machine screwed up the image recognition, but the cops blindly trusted it and arrested the guy.)
What happens when cops are allowed real-time access to Waymo's in-car video footage? Maybe they even have it already. This is just more pervasive, always- […]
- MostlyStable
As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.
- Gimpei
I dunno. This doesn’t bother me in the same way that flock cameras do. A Waymo car is a private space that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to. Seems pretty reasonable to me that Waymo doesn’t want their cars used for drive by shootings. If a drive by were to happen in a Waymo, this would be compelled by law anyway.
- lemmetellya
Wait, can I not carry in a Waymo?
Found their rules page: "Do not carry weapons of any kind in the car"
That seems... naive? Plenty of people carry pepper spray or a knife with them. Not even ever intending to use them as a weapon.
When I go to the range, I travel with a locked case that contains my pistol, which inside has a cable lock. I couldn't take that through a waymo?
What about some kid buying a goofy mall katana they are going to put on their wall?
Like, obviously brandishing a weapon should be disallowed, but merely having anything that's a weapon? Seems fraught.
- trolleski
If a human driver did the same we wouldn't have this conversation.
- handwarmers
Flock is bad, but fleets of cars strapped to the teeth with cameras and sensors are suddenly ok even when they call the police on you? Why? Because of the makers of the technology that powers the cars say they are safer (via datasets that we have no way to validate)?
- harshreality
Maybe we need very clear, standardized signals for entering a surveillance zone (where someone not obviously present, possibly a corporate stooge or AI or simpler-than-AI automated detection system, is judging behavior) so that people realize that private behavior (like casually showing off guns to each other, safely, which I've seen done myself and was not cause for alarm—guns were legal) is no longer private.
The steelman -against- what waymo did is:
Guns are generally legal, even in California. This is America, not the EU. Nobody was harmed, nobody was threatened. This is like calling the cops on someone open carrying because you don't like open carry.
That is what a lot of pro-2A libertarians would argue.
The steelman -pro- what waymo did is:
Private conveyance. Even though the occupants thought they were "alone", there was someone/something else present, which felt threatened (or thought the passengers represented a potential threat to others) and called police, as most cabbies or uber drivers probably would.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. This is a grey area, and I think it'll likely resolve in favor of waymo, and it won't really bother anyone except the staunch libertarians. If the gun hadn't been illegally possessed, likely nothing would've happened after the cops were called.