Can't Wait to Smell the GLOVE

I heard on NPR on the way home this afternoon that ICE plans to spend our tax dollars to buy millions of dollars worth of shock gloves to put on its storm troopers, so they can shock people into compliance without warning. 

Get this: the company that makes the devices is called Compliant Technology, and the things are an acronym called G.L.O.V.E. (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter). Bureaucrats and fascists all love a good euphemistic acronym.

This AP story has the details. Quoting that story: 

The manufacturer warns the device should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the public should have no confidence that ICE officers will use the devices appropriately. She questioned why the devices would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement and noted those getting shocked might have no advance warning.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” she said. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”

Supporters say the devices are generally used in specific jail and transport situations, rather than broadly to patrol on the streets. They have been used to subdue violent suspects who are refusing to get into squad cars and inmates who are harming themselves and threatening officers, according to Compliant Technologies.

The NPR story, however, said the gloves have been on the market for 10 years — 10 years! — and that while they have been bought by prisons and police departments, they have also been bought by schools. Schools. And even in the supposed intended use locations, does anyone believe that cops and prison guards only use them to get compliance in extreme situations?

The technology should not exist, the company should not exist, and ICE (and DHS) should not exist.