Police Shock Gloves Already Being Used In Schools

Do you know those shock gloves reportedly being given to ICE agents that everyone is up in arms about? Yeah, it turns out they’ve already been using them in schools. Not “considering,” not “piloting a program,” but already using them. On kids in hallways that are supposed to be the one place a teenager doesn’t have to think about getting shocked by an adult with a badge.

The gloves go by the name G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and someone got paid to make sure the acronym was cute. Somebody at a manufacturer called Compliant Technologies sat in a meeting and workshopped a name that sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon gadget for a device whose entire purpose is to hurt a human being into compliance. And it worked, because I guarantee half the parents who first heard “G.L.O.V.E.” pictured something a lot friendlier than what these things actually do, which is deliver a direct-contact electric shock to a student’s skin at the push of a button. A snappy name doesn’t make the pain any less real.

None of this comes cheap, either. The Omaha PD paid roughly $66,000 for forty of these gloves back in 2025. That should make every parent in that district furious. That’s real money, spent to arm school resource officers with a torture device, in a state that could always use another reading specialist or counselor or, hell, a working HVAC system in an aging school building. Every dollar sunk into hardware built to shock a 16-year-old is a dollar that didn’t go toward actually educating that kid.

“Officially,” the gloves are only supposed to come out when a student refuses to comply with a command. That may sound reasonable right up until you remember who’s making that call in the moment.

School resource officers are trained to subdue and de-escalate a situation, full stop. They are not counselors, and they are not trained to figure out whether the kid in front of them is defiant, having a mental health crisis, in the middle of a seizure, or just a scared 14-year-old who processes stress by shutting down and going quiet. A command not being followed instantly isn’t proof of a threat. Sometimes it’s just proof that the person giving the order didn’t stop to ask why.

Officers are also trained to hold contact and deliver the shock for up to 15 full seconds, which sounds like nothing until you actually count it out loud while imagining current running through your body the entire time. 15 seconds of involuntary electric current delivered as a compliance tool on a minor in a school starts to look less like restraint and more like torture.

We’ve already run this experiment once with TASERs, and the results weren’t exactly a public safety triumph. Police departments swore up and down that TASERs existed purely to end dangerous situations quickly and safely. Then the footage started rolling in of officers using them on people who were already restrained, already compliant, and already down.

I have no reason to believe the gloves won’t be used similarly once they’re standard issue and officers start reaching for them out of habit instead of last resort.

Some kid is going to end up on the ground with two or three officers piled on top of him shocking him in rotation while somebody barks, “Stop resisting,” at a body that’s already pinned and going nowhere. The gloves don’t stop that pile-up from happening. They just give everyone in it one more way to make it hurt.

However, to be fair to Omaha Public Schools, the state’s largest district, the superintendent asked the police department to stop using the gloves in Omaha Public Schools, and the Omaha PD agreed.

However, in nearby Bellevue, police didn’t get that memo, or more likely, got it and threw it in the trash. They’ve announced they’re keeping their gloves right where they are, thank you very much. Police Chief Ken Clary called them safe, effective, and less harmful than the alternatives.

This is the exact sentence every department says about every new pain-compliance device right up until the wrongful death lawsuit lands on their desk.

Omaha PD has said the gloves have already been used twice this school year. Once on a student from another school running from a fight and once on a special education student who reportedly threw a chair and struck a guard. I don’t doubt that second situation was scary for the adults in the room. I doubt very much that an electric shock was the intervention that kid needed.

(Source)