ICE recently announced plans to spend $20 million on thousands of pairs of electric shock gloves. They will use them to subdue immigrants, or perhaps bystanders or protesters. They deliver a painful shock at the mere touch of a hand. This is dystopian. They are made by a manufacturer in Kentucky called Compliant Technologies LLC.
The ACLU recently reviewed more than 1200 cases of ICE activity and found a shocking frequency of use of force:
A recent post from A Mighty Girl addresses this report and shares, “Reviewing more than 1,200 immigration enforcement operations over the past year, the ACLU documented agents pushing, tackling, or pinning people to the ground more than four hundred times, and using weapons — chemical irritants, rubber bullets, and Tasers — about as often. Its researchers catalogued chokeholds and officers kneeling on people’s necks, tactics many police departments ban outright, alongside agents ramming cars, boxing them in, and smashing windows.
“Immigration agents, one of the report’s authors said, have ‘used force in a way we’ve never seen from these agencies, in their history.'”
So now, ICE, which has innumerable documented cases of excessive force, is about to be fitted with shock gloves. A Mighty Girl also says that the shock gloves have been described as “an ‘invisible partner’ and a ‘force multiplier,'” and “prized by some officers for a telling reason: as one police official touted, the pain it inflicts leaves ‘no burn marks or scars.'”
That makes it harder to sue. It also makes it harder to pick up on video, at least in a provable way.
Horrifically, a news story recently developed in Omaha concerning the same gloves. Without superintendents or the school board knowing, similar gloves were purchased for Omaha Police Resource Officers in Omaha Public Schools. Teachers had no idea. Parents had no idea. Students had no idea.
Until they were used.
Twice — once on a middle school student and once on a high school special education student.
Parents and students packed a school board meeting, and I’m glad to tell you that these will no longer be used there.
Obviously, these kinds of gloves can be seriously dangerous to children or people who have disabilities. I’ve also read that there are disclaimers to this effect. But here’s the thing — it’s easy to guess incorrectly on the age of a person. It’s even harder to tell if someone has an invisible disability or chronic health condition. Also, a person might not even know that they have vulnerabilities in their heart or nervous system.
Who have we become that we are this willing to dehumanize? And who have we become that we’re willing to give whole classes of people this much power?
These gloves are dystopian.
—Renee Roederer Also, it’s not too late to call your senators and representatives about this.
Smuggling Grace 