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.
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.