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.
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.
They do not when it comes to things like batons and shotguns and whatever else they carry in their vehicle.
That is what I was originally replied to. My point is if you don’t trust an officer to wield it, don’t supply them with it.
Im not opposed to that either.
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.