Cops used electrocution gloves to subdue high school students in Omaha, now the school district and parents are pleading with police to stop: ‘Supposed to be a safe space for students’

Earlier in August, news broke that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to shell out $20 million to acquire thousands of electric-shock gloves. Dubbed the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter,” or G.L.O.V.E, the devices deliver a painful electric shock meant to immobilise anybody at the mere flick of a wrist. While the gloves may be new to the general American public, for the local cops, they have been there for a while. Moreover, they recently used them on two high school students.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, reported NPR. The first student was identified as trespassing at a different school, said Omaha police 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 “specialised program for students with social, emotional, behavioural 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 immobilising the kid long enough to detain them.After the news of the two incidents broke, Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray pleaded with the city police department to stop using the electrocution gloves against students. Though Omaha police refer to the gloves as their “safest use-of-force option” for subduing suspects, they agreed not to deploy the devices in schools anymore, according to the Associated Press. However, the suburban Bellevue police department that patrols two Omaha schools and the large Bellevue district said its officers will continue carrying the gloves. “I am not comfortable having our officers give up a tool that has repeatedly proven to be safe, effective and less harmful than the alternatives,” Bellevue’s police chief, Ken Clary said in a statement.Three other large school districts in the metro area that have Omaha school resource officers assigned to their buildings have not taken action to stop police from using the devices. Though Ray said he only learned about the gloves last week, local station KETV reported that police had informed school administrators about the devices as far back as 2023.The district’s request came after outraged parents and students spoke out against the use of extremely controversial devices, which are being procured by local and federal law enforcement agencies at an alarming rate. “I can’t even imagine walking down the hallway and seeing a peer of mine being electrocuted in a place that is supposed to be a safe space for students,” Nora Wessel, a senior at Omaha Central High School, said at a recent school board meeting, per the AP. “Yet, this is now a very real possibility. These are adults we are supposed to be able to trust, but these weapons create a barrier for our students to turn to resource officers when needed.”As recently as 2022, the company behind the devices, named “Compliant Technologies,” marketed the shock gloves as a “weapon” in its publicity material. Within the past few years, they’ve shifted, calling them “conductive distraction and de-escalation” devices. In 2025, Omaha police agreed to pay Compliant Technologies LLC, which manufactures the gloves, about $66,000 for 40 gloves, according to the contract.Officers were expected to give a warning before using the gloves and then touch the person for up to 15 seconds while the electric shock was delivered, the mayor and the police chief, Todd Schmaderer, said in a statement, as per The Guardian. The devices activate when an officer presses a button. The gloves must touch someone’s skin directly to produce voltage that causes pain, which is intended to make people stop resisting officers. Unlike stun guns, they do not leave burn or contact marks.In practice, the shock gloves seem like little more than rebranded tasers, although they’re much more “discreet,” as Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer told Government Technology in a statement. The devices might be inconspicuous, but that doesn’t automatically make them humane or effective tools for solving crime, as experts argue.Speaking to Mother Jones about the gloves, senior policy analyst at the Centre for Victims of Torture Yumna Rizvi referred to the devices as “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture,” adding that they have “no legitimate law enforcement purpose.”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. Predictably, this kind of policing has had an outsized effect on Black and disabled students, who are disproportionately cited and arrested by school cops, the ACLU found. Rather than acting as a check on police harassment, high-tech tools have only made the situation worse.