While Councilmembers Curren Price, Nithya Raman, Heather Hutt, and Hugo Soto-Martinez of the LA City Council said LAPD’s acquisition of a robot dog would be “an expansion of the current boundaries around policing and surveillance” and “used to police Black and Brown communities,” they struggled to explain how their sign-off on an increased police budget wouldn’t cause exactly those same harms to the communities they represent.