Robot raises the ire of homeless advocates

The Bum Bot.

That is what Rufus Terrill calls the rolling, remote-controlled invention he uses to flush out the prostitutes and pushers who gather near his Midtown Atlanta bar, which is two blocks from the city’s largest and most controversial homeless shelter.

“This is actually the Bum Bot 2000,” Terrill gently corrected on a recent evening as he switched on the device.

The Bum Bot, like the homeless people it polices, is a creature of hand-me-downs. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the elderly; the PA system is a walkie-talkie wired to a home-alarm speaker. The rotating turret is an old Cajun meat smoker.

The cylindrical smoker gives the Bum Bot its R2-D2-ish profile. But its black armor — made of exercise mats — and the stenciled letters spelling out SECURITY lend it a menacing air.

An infrared camera and a 2-million-candlepower spotlight are mounted on the turret under a homemade cannon, which squirts jets of cold water at up to 200 pounds per square inch.

Using a twin-joystick remote, Terrill usually sends his robot up the street to the parking lot of a day-care center, where a sketchy, drug-dealing crowd congregates after dark. The police sometimes round them up, Terrill says, but soon, it seems, they are back on the street.

So Terrill speaks to them through the Bum Bot, transmitting his voice via walkie-talkie: Move along, he tells the loiterers, or get wet.

Sometimes he tells them that he’s capturing them on video: the Bum Bot’s camera feeds into a big-screen TV back at his pub, giving patrons a hyper-local dose of reality TV. The street people tend to run away. “It scares the bejesus out of ‘em,” Terrill said, smiling.

His home-grown strategy for making the neighborhood safer is the latest manifestation of a lingering controversy that has engulfed this prized patch of real estate.

The perpetrators, he says, are the residents of the massive emergency homeless shelter nearby at Peachtree and Pine streets. Terrill says the shelter attracts the kind of people who have broken into his bar, O’Terrill’s, and harassed and mugged his neighbors and clients.

Known as Peachtree and Pine, the shelter has amassed other critics, including the administration of Mayor Shirley Franklin, a Democrat whose father was temporarily homeless.

Debi Starnes, the mayor’s policy adviser on homelessness, said the shelter, which can accommodate 1,000 people per night, is too big to be managed properly. She also said it fails to adequately help the homeless make the transition to a better life.

This year, the city cut off its funding of the shelter, which is run by the nonprofit Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. The shelter, however, carries on with a mix of other public and private funds; it’s in the midst of a multimillion-dollar renovation of its historic, 95,000-square-foot building. Eventually it will include a coffee shop and retail business to help teach its residents a trade.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos Respond to this email