Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.
The decision affecting most Omaha middle and high schools came after The Associated Press first revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers the gloves, which are known as G.L.O.V.E.s or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters. The devices have also been used in recent years by some jails.
Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray requested that police working in the schools, known as school resource officers, stop using the gloves. Omaha Police agreed.
They shouldn’t have shock gloves in the first place.
In fact, I will go so far to say that police should be unarmed by default. They can carry a baton, but a remote operator has to give the okay to unlock the baton for extension. A squad car can have a shotgun with rubber slugs, but the trunk also has to be remotely unlocked. Police should also receive permission from an operator for turning off their camera.
Bluntly, the police cannot be trusted with power.
Public site, 100% uptime, every weapons pull listed in real time. They put those gloves on, it’s noted, they pull the baton out, it’s listed. They draw their guns it’s listed. Transparency would be a good start. Body camera footage should also be available to the people in the videos automatically in identification.
There shouldn’t be any police in schools in the first place, like in the rest of the world.
That too, but all cops should be like this. They shouldn’t be allowed access to any weapon unless specifically authorize for an active crime where it’s absolutely necessary in the public interest.
I agree but the tech can’t be trusted to work when it needs to.
I trust the tech way more than the cops, and I do NOT trust the tech.
Insane comment. What is the equipment even necessary for with that limited access?
Perhaps that is your point, but it might as well be people deployed from a location rather than onsite personnel.
There are many parts of America where people - and by consequence, officers - are thinly spread out. Having potential access to firepower is sometimes important for the occasional bear or person who is shooting at signs.
In cases where martial power is needed, contacting people is a thing that should be done by default. Having a potential ambulance in the wings, social workers and other police on notice, and so on, is good practice.
We now live in a age where ships at sea can have reliable access to the internet. Society should take advantage of that to ensure that police officers are not able to harm their communities. We do that, by making the powers of an officer conditional - that they are recorded at all times for infractions, prevent them from instinctively reaching for a gun, and making them aware that brutality isn’t an crutch that they can rely upon.
I thought that a platform often interested in self hosting would loathe the idea of remotely activated equipment that’s often getting used in the moment, like a remotely activated baton (lol).
My take is that you either trust it with people in the field or you don’t.
Your typical forum-goer doesn’t have the potential to kill strangers. If someone has the power to kill, they must be held to far greater scrutiny and responsibility than the ordinary person.
If it were possible, I would prefer the police to not exist outright. Barring that, the next best thing is to highly regulate their existence and procedures.
Got it you hate cops and have unrealistic ideas about how to regulate them. I think my original comment alluded to that pretty well.
Cops have spent my entire life being shitty protectors of capitalism and racism. Of course I would distrust them by default, because they haven’t given me a reason to trust their character and motives.
As to my proposals being unrealistic? I think they would be much cheaper and practical than the current version of policing. A fair chunk of a town’s money is spent on wrongful conduct lawsuits, due to the police abusing their power. We can have much more money to spend on social goods, if we took away the unimpeded powers of police.
Agreed on not trusting the police.
Who’s the hall monitor activating the equipment? Some person also getting paid to watch a bunch of live body cams?
The same person who calls in a helicopter when that’s necessary. You’re writing as if dispatchers don’t already exist to provide cops all their resources and backup on demand.
An out-of-police-jurisdiction response center, with monitoring staff. Police and other social workers call in to report potential encounters, then are actively monitored via the body and dash cameras. The staff are not employed by police nor the city, instead it is hired by the state government, into which local governments put their taxes.
The staff are a mixture of government staff and civil rights members. Each monitoring shift has least one member of the state and civil rights working together as a pair, and the pairings are reworked each month. This makes it harder to develop a ‘good old boy’ club for corruption to take root in.
Police footage that hasn’t been actively monitored is reviewed a week or two after the fact, with a team of reviewers to go over it - they do stuff like redactions, legal analysis, deletions of mundane activity, and so forth. As with the monitoring pairs, the reviewer team is a mix of state personnel with civil rights watchdogs. If the center’s review team can’t agree about what to do with footage, members pass a copy along to their respective organizations.
If they can deploy a hundred thousand multi vector public surveillance cameras in a matter of months almost escaping public notice, they can invent a bunch of devices to monitor the cops just as easily. To hell with them.