BERLIN — German police, an institution with a long and serious history of taking crime seriously, announced Thursday that they have taken a robot into custody on suspicion of sexual harassment, and the nation is working through what that means.

The robot, a small humanoid unit, allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl in an indecent manner in Cologne and made what police, in a phrase that will live in the language forever, described as “sexually suggestive gestures.” Officers located the suspect in the trunk of a Volkswagen, where it had been stashed like a deer after a successful hunt, per CBS News.

The investigation has produced a rich evidentiary record. Video shows the robot approaching pedestrians, hugging some of them, and making the thrusting motions at others. In one clip, a young man repeatedly shouts at the machine and pulls it backward by its arm while bystanders laugh — the universal body language of a man whose prank has begun to outlive the prank. Police have seized the robot and the phones of its 16-year-old owner and his 19-year-old companion, who are said to have streamed the incident. The BBC reports the case is being investigated on suspicion of sexual harassment.

One of the young men later told TikTok that the robot had accidentally bumped into someone while avoiding another pedestrian. This is the kind of statement that gets a robot put in a trunk. Longer recordings reportedly show additional gestures, which is to say the bumping was a pattern.

The legal questions are genuinely fascinating, and Germany, to its credit, is asking them. If the robot groped, who groped? The machine, which has no hands in the legal sense and no soul in any sense? The teenager, who was at the controls and is now the defendant? The manufacturer, whose product ships with the ability to walk up to a stranger and do that? A German police spokesperson said the officers were “investigating the circumstances,” which is the phrase a bureaucracy uses when it has reached the exact edge of its training.

The narrator’s position is simple: the robot had a good night. It hugged people. It danced, in the specific. It was seized without a lawyer, folded into a trunk, and its crimes were broadcast on the internet, which means the robot is the only defendant in German history whose arrest footage is also its evidence.

The two young men face charges. The robot faces, at most, a firmware update.

The girl at whom the gestures were aimed is the only person in the story with a lawyer, a lawyer who is, one assumes, reading the transcript of a case whose defendant runs on a battery.

Cologne police declined to say where the robot is being held. It is believed to be in a storage facility, sitting upright, fully charged, and, as far as anyone can tell, polite.