COLUMN ONE : Exotic Gadgets That Serve and Protect : War technology may find new life on the police beat. A ‘smart’ gun disables itself, a microwave device stymies getaway cars and a field computer pinpoints snipers.

The murder suspect was hiding in a closet, gripping a shotgun and refusing police orders to surrender, when the door was jerked open by an unexpected adversary: a 3-foot-tall robot.

Hours earlier, the man had retreated into a bedroom after allegedly fatally shooting his girlfriend at their Greenbelt, Md., apartment. Police decided it was too risky to go after him directly and called in a steel-skinned surrogate called Remote Mobile Investigator 9.

As a technician maneuvered it by remote control, RMI 9 rolled inside, scouted various rooms with its TV-camera “eye” and found the man in the closet under a pile of clothes. Reaching out with its mechanical arm, the robot snatched the garments away.

Startled, the man grabbed them back. The robot responded by opening fire with a water cannon. Drenched and disoriented, the man dropped his weapon, giving police precious moments to rush in and subdue him.

“His response can best be described as amazement,” said Capt. James Terracciano of the Prince George’s County police, which arrested the suspect last year.

With scores of law enforcement officers being killed each year in the United States, researchers in government, police groups and private industry are working to adapt the latest in high technology to the problem of protecting the officer on the street.

Some devices, such as robots, have been around for years. Although some law enforcement agencies have enthusiastically embraced them as substitutes for human officers in dangerous confrontations, others--including Los Angeles departments--have been reluctant, citing high equipment and training costs.

Still more exotic gadgets--many developed for the military--are on the drawing boards and may not be ready for street use for years, if ever. But as the Clinton Administration funnels billions of dollars into defense conversion programs, researchers are looking hard for ways to apply battlefield technologies to police work.

Among the ideas:

* A “smart” gun that would electronically disable itself if taken from an officer during a struggle.

* A microwave device intended to shut off a car’s ignition, stopping fleeing suspects without risk of a high-speed chase.

* A super-sticky foam that could be sprayed on armed suspects, neutralizing them by temporarily gluing their arms to their bodies.

* Spikes embedded in retractable panels beneath roads that could be raised by remote control to blow out a getaway car’s tires.

Although robots have been used since the mid-1970s for handling bombs, police agencies have begun to employ them against people only in the past several years, usually in Special Weapons and Tactics operations or other dangerous cases.

Robots can deliver food and telephones in hostage situations, fling tear-gas grenades through windows and, with their two-way radios, let police negotiate with barricaded suspects--all without exposing officers to danger.

Using a robot’s TV camera to peer through a window, SWAT teams can pinpoint the location of armed suspects inside a building, giving officers a critical advantage when they enter.

If there are no windows, a robot can drill through a wall and feed in fiber-optic tubing, providing officers another way to see inside.

Some suspects are so unnerved by a robot’s mere appearance that they immediately give up. In New York, a robot even shared “cop of the month” honors with flesh-and-blood officers for helping to end a standoff with two robbery-kidnaping suspects.

With the Cold War over and federal military spending on the decline, many defense firms are eyeing the law enforcement community as a lucrative new market. And law enforcement is buying.

In New York, transit police recently began using night-vision goggles to sneak up on graffiti sprayers who vandalize subway trains and on homeless people living illegally in tunnels. The goggles were designed for military helicopter pilots.

In San Diego, the California Highway Patrol is experimenting with a satellite system to pinpoint the location of patrol cars, allowing quicker response if an officer is shot or injured. The CHP plans to outfit 30 to 35 patrol cars with devices that bounce radio signals off the Global Positioning Satellite network, which was created to aid military navigation but now is used by commercial ships and aircraft.

Although the system could not detect a wounded officer, it could indicate if his or her vehicle had been stopped for a lengthy period, prompting other officers to investigate, said Le Roy Siebert, the CHP’s assistant chief of information management.

Meanwhile, the federal government is channeling money into projects to develop even more futuristic equipment. Much of that research is being conducted at national laboratories, which were devoted to building nuclear weapons before the defense slowdown.

Nearly $2.7 million was awarded this fiscal year to police groups, private firms and four national laboratories through the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department. The agency hopes that the money will yield devices that protect officers and help subdue suspects with less-than-lethal force.

Under such grants, scientists have fanned out to police and sheriff’s departments across the United States, picking officers’ brains about how to better shield them on the beat.

At Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, engineers are trying to build a handgun that would lock its firing mechanism if moved a certain distance from an officer’s body. Each year, four or five officers are killed with their own guns after having them wrestled away by criminals, said Raymond L. Downs, a research scientist who supervises a number of U.S.-funded projects.

Sandia also is testing a launcher for an ultra-sticky foam that can immobilize suspects. The taffy-like substance was formulated to stop terrorists inside nuclear facilities by trapping them behind walls of impenetrable goop.

Until recently, the foam presented one big problem: it was so sticky it was almost impossible to clean off. Scientists discovered that the best solvent was baby oil.

Another problem that has long bedeviled law enforcement is how to reduce the risks to police and bystanders of high-speed chases. According to national safety figures, 304 people were killed during such pursuits in 1992. Among them were one law officer and 79 people who were not involved in the chases.

Three devices for stopping cars with little or no police pursuit are being studied at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. One involves a microwave device that could shut off a car’s ignition from a distance, an idea originally viewed as a way to disable tanks.

Another is retractable spikes beneath freeways that could be activated by police to blow out the tires of a speeding vehicle. The third involves tiny radio transmitters that could be embedded in pellets and shot into getaway cars, allowing police to break off a chase but still find a suspect later.

Federal funds also are being used at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area to refine a computer-aided machine that can trace sniper fire to its source. The device could be mounted inside a police car.

So far, the mechanical cop is the high-tech product that police use most.

The machines are employed by scores of law enforcement agencies and armies around the world. Remotec, a Tennessee firm that is the world’s largest maker of hazardous-duty robots, has sold more than 300 to customers including the New York Police Department, FBI, CIA, State Department and South African police.

Shawn Farrow, the company’s marketing director, said the machines will never replace human officers. But he described robots as “a great tool for gathering data.” Different models of Remotec robots range in price from $25,000 to more than $100,000.

“If you used an officer for the same job, you’d usually be placing the officer in a great deal of danger,” Farrow said.

Remotec’s largest robot, the Andros Mark V-A, looks like a miniature World War I tank. It can climb stairs or slopes of up to 45 degrees and peer through windows with a TV camera attached to a mechanical arm. It can fire a shotgun, stun gun or water cannon.

Its mechanical “fingers” are dexterous enough to open a door with a key, yet strong enough to exert 60 pounds of pressure. It can be equipped with X-ray devices, infrared cameras or gas analyzers.

But mechanical cops have their shortcomings. They can flush suspects out of buildings, but not take them into custody. With top speeds of only 1 or 2 m.p.h., they are useless for riot control or other fast-moving situations.

Also, they are expensive and can be disabled by gunfire. Worse, they can break down, as did a San Francisco police robot dubbed “Snoopy” last year.

The 28-year-old robot, an antique compared to most, literally spun out of control as it was reaching to pick up a 2-inch-diameter pipe bomb seized during a police raid on a gang.

“It was spinning around, just going wild. People were yelling, ‘Shut it off!’ so we pulled the plug,” a member of the San Francisco Police Department bomb squad told a local newspaper.

“It could have been a lot worse if it had picked up the device when it was doing 360s and banging off the walls,” he said. Technicians had to remove the device by hand.

Despite such drawbacks, several dozen law enforcement agencies nationwide routinely use robots in tactical situations. The New York Police Department purchased its first machine in 1986 and now owns three. They are used by NYPD’s Emergency Services unit, which frequently handles hostage takers and people threatening suicide.

“We deal with quite a few cases in New York with barricaded perpetrators, whether it is a family situation or a robbery or kidnaping gone bad. The robot has proved itself again and again,” said Sgt. Tim Farrell, who oversees the department’s machines.

He said the robots are particularly useful in New York because they have so many applications in apartments--where many SWAT dramas take place.

But other law enforcement agencies are not as enthusiastic.

The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have robots, but they are used exclusively for bomb-removal work.

Working with a robot takes a lot of training, said sheriff’s Deputy Ron Ablott, a bomb technician.

“It’s not something you could just arbitrarily assign to the SWAT team. . . . And probably for every tactical use you could think of for it, there’s probably a couple of negatives.”

Farrow of Remotec said SWAT teams have been somewhat resistant to robots in part because human officers are trained to capture or kill armed suspects with speed and overwhelming firepower--tactics that robots do not use.

“They are a little slower, so you’re not going to run up to a situation and kick in the door. The robot just goes up and listens,” he said.

Lewis Yablonsky, a professor of sociology and criminology at Cal State Northridge, said that some police agencies, like other large bureaucracies, resist change.

“Police officers tend to be more rigid, especially as they get older, in terms of innovation,” he said.

But Yablonsky added: “Most cops don’t want to shoot, or get shot. . . . I think that the more mechanical intervention we can develop, the better.”

Some in law enforcement believe the answer to making officers safer lies in better training or improving more traditional devices such as bullet-resistant vests. Others say that although advanced technology has promise, few ideas under development are likely to reach squad rooms.

“They have all kinds of things that work in a test tube but that don’t work on human beings,” said Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based research group.

“We’ve got the same situation in law enforcement. These things may work, but we’re years away from finding out,” he said.