Electric-shock gloves used on students in Nebraska are the latest sign of how policing, surveillance, and military technology have entered American schools.
Plans by ICE to buy $10 million to $20 million worth of “shock gloves” sparked widespread outrage this summer. The gloves’ maker, ominously named Compliant Technologies, sells largely to prisons, jails, and police departments. Now comes news that its Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, or G.L.O.V.E.—which administers painful electric shocks without leaving marks on the skin—has already been used in schools.
Nebraska Public Media recently reported that resource officers in Omaha area schools were provided the gloves and trained with them last year. Since then, they have been used on students twice. And despite backlash after this report, the gloves have been banned from only some of the schools to which the Omaha Police Department sends officers. It is unclear where else in the country the gloves may be in use in school settings.
What is clear: The rise in authoritarian policing we’ve seen in recent years—often aided by surveillance equipment and other tools and techniques from war zones—has made its way into K-12 schools. Shock gloves, evocative of dystopian fiction, are a vivid, tangible symbol of this growth in violence against adults and children here at home.
Anne started teaching in public schools a few years after the Columbine shootings when districts began to “harden” schools. They tried to make buildings less accessible to intruders (e.g., via door-locking systems) and to make it harder to get weapons into them (e.g., via metal detectors). School shootings did not decline, of course, as guns continued to be readily available. More police were sent into schools. Newtown, Parkland, Uvalde, and too many others followed, and spending on school security has soared.
District budgets, mirroring the US federal discretionary budget, are being distorted as basic needs get crowded out by so-called security spending. Districts now spend over $4 billion annually on policing systems and equipment and billions more on personnel. Budgets can include dollars for:
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- AI-powered Flock cameras on school grounds
- Verkada cameras with facial-recognition capabilities inside buildings and on buses
- Systems monitoring student online activity in school and out
- Security guards and (mostly armed) police officers
- Training to arm teachers in states where this has been made legal
- Drones that can cut through classroom windows and spray pepper balls at an assailant
- Sensors with microphones in school bathrooms to detect vaping and more
The lack of research justifying this costly panoply of measures turns tragedy to farce. A 2023 review of existing research on school-based law enforcement found no impact on crime but did find a detrimental effect on students. Students feel a lack of trust that corrodes school climate and can worsen behavior. More children are removed from schools through suspension or expulsion, with no effect on safety in the school as a whole. In addition, surveillance technology produces false positives for weapons and threats of violence that can lead to students being unnecessarily searched, arrested, and put in lockdown.
Worse still, overpolicing removes too many children from schools—especially Black children and students with disabilities—and sends them into the maw of a harsh justice system that can consume them. And, of course, all students suffer an invasion of privacy by school officials, police, and a bevy of corporations, with their data made vulnerable to use by profit-seekers, including hackers.
How did it get this bad? Though school-based policing has a history that can be traced from desegregation to the War on Drugs to the era of school shootings, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were pivotal in its militarization. Local police departments began to receive large quantities of free, excess military equipment via what Stephen Semler calls the “Pentagon-to-police pipeline,” a flow that correlates with more violent policing. Militarization has spread to school systems as more police have entered school buildings, defense contractors have sought new markets, and MAGA has become more autocratic.
Products sold to districts and the military language used to market them often tell the story. Flock boasts that its cameras create a “perimeter” of safety. The Guardian reports that the pepper-spray drones being sold to schools were inspired by those used in the Russian war on Ukraine. The drones’ parent company, Mithril Defense, describes itself as a maker of “battlefield machines” for “modern warfare.”
Then there are those electric-shock gloves connecting ICE and schools. On the day after his second inauguration, Trump rescinded the rule that kept schools safe from immigration enforcement, and in the year and a half since, his administration has given ICE tremendous funding, power, and equipment to act as a paramilitary force. As the new school year begins across the country, ICE is once again abducting parents at school bus stops and in front of schools and daycare centers.
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ICE agents have been, as we’ve seen repeatedly and as the ACLU documents, “using force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance.” That any school officers have donned shock gloves deemed suitable for ICE shows the extent to which school security has become militarized and school discipline more threatening.
Authoritarians strip citizens of their privacy, criminalize more behaviors, normalize state violence, inspire fear, and suppress dissent—and, critically, they force conformity and obedience in children. NPR reported that the rationale for inflicting an electric shock on one of the two students upon whom the gloves were used last year in Nebraska was “noncompliance.” The question is whether the goal is for schools to resemble prisons, in which intimidated children are taught compliance and obedience as first values, or safe, welcoming communities of learners and active citizens—and what kind of country we want our children to grow up in.
Between the reemergence of right-wing red-baiting and Donald Trump’s use of the chilling National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 to criminalize left political organizing, we’re seeing McCarthyism reborn before our eyes.
This assault on democracy cannot be ignored or wished away. Resisting it requires bravery in the face of threats and repression, a steadfast commitment to the truth, and the unwavering belief that we can—and will—overcome this darkness.
We must have an independent media that sets the record straight, unearths corruption and abuses of power, and advances a politics of justice and dignity for all if we’re to win this fight.
That’s why I’m writing to you today. This September, The Nation needs to add 100 monthly donors to sustain our progressive journalism. Your contribution makes the next investigative report, the next truth-speaking column, and the next pathbreaking essay all possible.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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