By now you’ll know that Dallas shooter Micah Johnson was killed after a stand-off with police, but it was the way in which he was killed that raised many eyebrows.

Following a number of threats and taunts made against police involved in negotiations (HERE), they made the decision to send in a bomb detection robot. Rather than find a bomb, however, the robot was loaded with explosives and detonated with the intent to kill.

Gizmodo gives us the facts we need to know:

The robot is made by Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary Remotec. According to the [Dallas Police] department, the model is an F5 model and used C4 and a “det” cord for the operation.

According to experts, it’s the first lethal use by a civilian police force of a military bomb robot. Similar robots have been used in high-stress situations, such as defusing bombs or even delivering pizzas to prevent suicide, but nothing quite like this.

“It is the first deliberately,” Peter Singer of the New America Foundation, told Gizmodo via email. “There has been sketchy reporting on an accidental case in [Tennessee], where tear gas canister shot during a standoff accidentally started a fire that burned down a mobile home.”

The Dallas PD has yet to officially confirm exactly which robot was used, with some insisting it would have been the Marcbot-IV EOD Dallas PD.

A little U.S. Army demo of it in action:

Others are not so convinced, saying the Dallas PD also owns the more advanced Mark 5A-1. This offers a number of additional functions and features that may have come in handy.

[The] bots have a wider array of features, including colour surveillance cameras, robotic arm with seven degrees of motion, camera extenders, and wheels to help climb stairs (the gunman was cornered on the second floor).

Whichever model they used they achieved the desired end result, although how that came to occur may well serve to further inflame an already tense situation.

[source:gizmodo]