This police robot could make traffic stops safer

By Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky and David Freeman, NBC News

A California man has built a robot that he hopes will take some of the danger out of traffic stops — those anxiety-provoking and potentially deadly encounters between police officers and motorists that play out on American roads more than 50,000 times a day.

“I got tired of hearing news reports of motorists and cops getting shot or run over in traffic stops, usually in what seemed like preventable situations,” Reuben Brewer, a mechanical engineer at the nonprofit research organization SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and the robot’s inventor, said in an email. “I’d be absolutely thrilled for this robot to save even a single life … No one should die in a traffic stop.”

Nationwide statistics on traffic stop outcomes are hard to find, but experts say they lead to many injuries and deaths each year — particularly among black motorists, who are more likely than their white counterparts to experience violence from police….

Brewer, who built the first version of GoBetween in his garage and bolted it onto his own car for testing, agrees. “It’s only part of the solution,” he said of the robot. “But I hope one day it could save lives.”

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