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.
Uvalde was an absolute shit-show, and it's a travesty of justice that those larping bastards didn't face any criminal consequences for their negligent inaction. The anguish they wreaked by their cowardice on the children and families of that community should be revisited one-hundred-fold every second of their miserable lives.
That said...
The School Resource Officer programs are a different animal. A good, effective SRO is a community member of the school. He or she is there to partner with kids, teachers, administrators, and parents. They are there to prevent, de-escalate, and deter. The ones that are good at building rapport with the kids are effective at identifying kids in danger, in trouble, or on a pathway to violence.
And in the good school systems, the SROs are integral parts of the Behavioral Threat Assessment Teams, making sure that any indicators of violent intent is taken seriously and assessed by a multidisciplinary team following a clinically validated process.
In a lot of instances, SROs are old-timers awaiting retirement, rookies that think every kid is part of a crime syndicate, a road cop that got stuck on a rotation that couldn't give a shit, or something else besides a decent human being. But in many cases, even some of the shitty ones have intervened and stopped active assailants. And that's a sad reality.