GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
Earlier in August, the Associated Press broke the news that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to spend upwards of $20 million dollars to acquire thousands of electric-shock gloves. Dubbed the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter,” or G.L.O.V.E, the ominously-named devices deliver a painful electric shock meant to immobilize anybody at the mere flick of a wrist.
And though the gloves might be new to most of the American public, they’re certainly not new to local cops, who it turns out are just as likely to use them on vulnerable high school students as they are on violent adult suspects.
In Omaha, Nebraska, at least two high school students had been subdued by school resource officers using the gloves across the 2025-2026 school year, NPR reports.
The first student was identified as trespassing at a different school, Omaha police said in a statement viewed by NPR. When he tried to flee, police applied a shock to his wrist for “approximately two seconds” to detain him.
The second high schooler was enrolled in Omaha Public Schools’ Integrated Learning Program, described as a “specialized program for students with social, emotional, behavioral, and learning deficits.”
After this student made “verbal threats” and “threw a chair at the school security guard,” officers delivered two consecutive shocks — a one-second shock followed by a longer two-to-three-second shock, apparently — immobilizing the kid long enough to detain them.
In the statement, Omaha police seemed more concerned about their own safety than that of the students they were zapping, saying “we are constantly seeking ways to keep the public and police officers safe through innovations like GLOVE.”
It’s just the latest escalation in the increasingly dystopian reality of American schooling. With a massive rise in school shootings over the past few decades, many students have grown accustomed to walking through remote operated blast doors into security checkpoints chock full of metal detectors manned by armed police officers.
Whether this kind of high-tech security theater actually keeps students safe is debatable. As one recent report by the ACLU of Iowa found, school police are increasingly being used to maintain classroom discipline for minor infractions like vaping and disrespectful conduct, a marked departure from the task of deterring criminal activity.
... continue reading