Arizona SWAT team looks to add monkey

[SeleucusNicator]

Yahoo News reports...

Police in Ariz. Seek Monkey for SWAT Team

MESA, Ariz. - The Mesa Police Department is looking to add some primal instinct to its SWAT team. And to do that, it's looking to a monkey.

"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. "It would change the way we do business."

Truelove is spearheading the department's request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee. The department is seeking about $100,000 in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations.

The monkey, which costs $15,000, is what Truelove envisions as the ultimate SWAT reconnaissance tool.

Since 1979, capuchin monkeys have been trained to be companions for people who are quadriplegics by performing daily tasks, such as serving food, opening and closing doors, turning lights on and off, retrieving objects and brushing hair.

Truelove hopes the same training could prepare a monkey for special-ops intelligence.

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

It has been a little over a year since Truelove filed a grant proposal with the U.S. Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he is still waiting for word.

If the grant goes through, Truelove plans on learning how to train the monkey himself and keeping the sociable monkey at home, just like a K-9 officer would. He projects that $85,000 in grant money would outfit the monkey with gear and pay for veterinarian care, food and habitat for three years.

Hopefully Rumsfeld gives this the go-ahead. It would be interesting to see.

 

[thetrooper]

And the kevlar vest is essential outfit for the assignment

 

[Scuffer]

Rumsfeld is probably drawing up plans for a light, fast, flexible mobile attack force, staffed entirely by monkeys. Hopefully he won't deploy to attack any banana republics, or it'll be chaos.

 

[MarineCorps]

Smart idea. Small and very nimble, monkeys could be very helpful. But still very funny to think of.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

They should include gorillas, for tackling suspects to the ground, and train chimps to be snipers

 

[IglooDame]

Oh, sure, we say monkeys aren't responsible enough so we ban smoking for them, but it is okay for them to risk their lives serving in SWAT teams...

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Yeah, poor monkey, they wont even let him chill out with a cig after a dangerous mission:shakehead

 

[Simon Darkshade]

Mmm...I'm looking forward to eating that monkey so much...

A great idea, and just the starting point - swarms of insects as crowd control, gorilla guerillas, killer whale paratroops, hungry great cat guards, sharks with fricken laser beams on their heads and pigs in space!

 

[Akka]

And after that, people will say that animals and humans are fundamentally differents

 

[Desmond Hawkins]

I just got a cheap laugh thinking about a bonobo with a grenade belt.