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.
Why are there police in American schools? That’s very weird.
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.
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
Having police in schools stops school shooters… /s if it isn’t fucking obvious
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Cause of genuine mentally defective individuals that lack impulse control, that go and do violent ass shit.