Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.

The decision affecting most Omaha middle and high schools came after The Associated Press first revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers the gloves, which are known as G.L.O.V.E.s or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters. The devices have also been used in recent years by some jails.

Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray requested that police working in the schools, known as school resource officers, stop using the gloves. Omaha Police agreed.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Parents who support this support it for “urban” schools. They don’t believe it will ever be used in their white, suburban public schools.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Absolutely weird, but the situation probably isn’t exactly like what you’re envisioning. Outside of a few notoriously violent/“gang activity” regions, they’re not regular staff - there will be a couple of School Resource Officers (yeah, really what they’re called) for an entire district, and they will float around to the various schools on a schedule (ex: my comically awful highschool had one stop by every two weeks).

      They’re also there almost entirely to deal with incredibly tedious administrative tasks that students never see - things like truancy cases, monitoring parental custody orders, coordinating public risk management, following up on teacher concerns about abuse, monitoring sentence diversions, deeply unglamorous but fairly important things like that. The cliche’d idea of them “stopping school shooters” has never been what SROs are for despite what they may claim their role is (uvalde utterly debunked that pigmyth…). And while the popular image of police “raiding lockers” searching for drugs is absolutely based on real events, it’s a pretty dated meme at this point; mass “dragnet” searches like that have been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional (I haven’t heard of one happening in years), and very few highschools even have student lockers anymore.

      Excessive force like using these “tazer gloves” is just yet another thread in the greater tapestry of the US’ issues with policing, which can be boiled down to two major issues: First, that the police have been used as the catchall for tasks that really shouldn’t be their job, and second that those interdisciplinary tasks have been given to a group that is worryingly easily infiltrated by fascists. The first point is a lot more addressable than the second, but as several regions have started shifting from the police there’s been dramatic improvement in the fascist problems as well, and among the most successful have been replacing SROs with Limited LEOs (essentially social workers with very restricted legal enforcement powers, who exist entirely separately from the police). Really, it’s a very outdated concept and absolutely is not a role the police should have ever been used for.

    • TargaryenTKE@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Stopping fights, looking for drugs or weapons, giving kids a head start on a life full of imprisonment; you know, the same safety regulations every sane nation would have 🙄 Growing up with parts of my childhood in the US private and public educational system, it became very clear very quick that the cops didn’t really give a single shit about me or saving my life if something happened. They were there to ‘keep an eye on the troubled, inner-city kids’ i.e. “scare and threaten the minority* kids”

      *I say minority but my school was actually pretty diverse, all things considered, though the black kids definitely had a slim majority

    • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Important to note that it’s typically violence against people who can’t really push back without risking getting killed.
      It’s time to make bullies afraid again, but I don’t know how without starting a total escalation.

    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This was an example of American corruption. A school official probably has a friend who is involved with the shock glove company and got kick backs for buying weapons to use on children.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Officers were expected to give warning before using the gloves and then touch the person for up to 15 seconds while the electric shock was delivered, the statement said.

    According to the manual, these things (the Gen 5 gloves) are discharging 324–362V at 0.7–1.2A and the Gen 4s 210–380V at 0.9–1.5A.

    That’s around half a kW for you folks keeping track at home. Better hope little Timmy’s heatlh class is teaching him what a regular sinus rhythm is.

    I hope any officer who uses that on a child gets a prostate exam with a G.L.O.V.E. equipped.

  • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Turns out if you call all cops bastards enough, the ones who aren’t just leave or don’t sign up in the first place because they don’t want to be hated, leaving only those who don’t mind or enjoy the hate.

    Eventually the actual percentage will hit 100%.

    • wookiepedia@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      What a hilariously stupid take. The cops have earned every ounce of hate that they get, and then some. How’s that boot taste, buddy?

      • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        Sorry but I don’t have time to waste on people who start a comment with

        What a hilariously stupid take.

        (apart from the obvious - calling them out for their bad-faith tactics)

        In the future, make comments of substance rather than waste time with “I disagree and you are dumb.”