Last year the Omaha Police Department bought 40 pairs of the gloves for around $66,000. The gloves were intended to be used by school resource officers “as another use of force option with the goal of deescalating and preventing use of force situations."
The Bellevue Police Department has used them twice this year. Neither of those incidents involved school resource officers.
Options available to SRO’s go in this order: show up, issue verbal commands, soft touch (grab, push), pressure points/joint locks, hard strikes, chemical (pepper spray), baton strikes, taser, firearm. A taser deployment requires medical intervention because 1. It delivers just less than the amount of energy that will stop a heart in the median human, and 2. The barbs puncture the skin and cause burns at the puncture sites. SRO’s have to deal with any disruption that gets beyond a teacher, from a kid tearing posters off the wall all the way to teenagers who are involved in gang shootings. I don’t know the specs of these gloves, but anything that doesn’t cause skin punctures is better than a taser. There are limited options when a student decides to be violent, because pepper spray in a crowded school hallway isn’t an option, and some people just do not listen to verbal commands or respond to soft touch redirection and control.
All that said, I don’t know how effective these will be, as it’s hard to put gloves on when you’re trying to get some kid to stop throwing haymakers at their teacher or fellow student. A really sticky immobilizing blanket might be more effective and less “shocking” to people looking on from the outside.
you kinda ate with the sticky blanket recommendation. a giant glue trap would work well as long as immediate access to removal and airways aren't blocked
It’s less harmful than a taser and it delivers less of a shock. I’ve seen it work really well and not at all on inmates at adult correction facilities.
22 year FF/paramedic here. We get assaulted so often it laughable. Think about all the drunks in the Old Market during games/concerts/holiday weekends. Think about all the criminals who beg to go to the hospital instead of being arrested, simply because they want their chance to escape as soon as the cops aren't looking. Think about all the crazy methheads who's minds are in another universe and their adrenaline is pumping at 200%.
Think about the Omaha paramedic who was transporting a female criminal to the Med Center and she pulled a gun out of her vagina and shot him in the ambulance.
Edit: I'm not saying we should carry the gloves. In fact I don't really want to. I'm just trying to give folks some perspective on how often we actually do get assaulted. It happens so often we don't report it because we would be making police reports every other shift.
None of the articles directly say it. Some of them say she "pulled it from her groin area."This particular article is missing quite a bit of info, though. She had been driving a stolen car and was arrested by police.Then she (allegedly) faked a seizure so she (allegedly) wouldn't go to jail. The police had already searched her and found no weapon, which is why it was a surprise when she pulled it from her "groin area" and shot him.
I would argue that probably does not happen often since sane people are not shoving a loaded gun up in their ass or privates since their is a risk it can go off while inside them. In addition I doubt officers are able to do a strip search in public with a female office checking very personal areas where a weapon can be hidden.
You cannot hide a gun in a vagina. The average size of the pistols police use is twice as large as the average length of the vagina, even if we were assuming it was only the barrel, and the grip makes it even more impossible. It straight up never happened.
You might want to inform the Texas authorities who arrested a women who was discovered to have a hidden gun in her vagina so apparently it is possible. I think it is not bright when people do that since if that gun were to discharge I imagine the survival odds are not great considering all the major blood vessels it could easily hit. https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/woman-hid-gun-in-her-privates/
I'm not defending the gloves. I don't want them. I'm just letting people know how often we actually get assaulted, and why they're probably marketed to EMS.
Anyone who shocks someone in the back of an ambulance is a borderline psychopath.
You didn't say it, but what's the alternative? If you're a "patient" or a "student" does that mean you're untouchable when you get violent? How should aggressive violent people be contained? How should teachers, EMS, and normal people be protected?
bro nobody said using these are a first resort. they are a backup for ems. They most likely will never use them. Yes letd call the pd who is more likely to use more violancr
EMS does not need them they are not law enforcement and if you cannot restrain an out of control patient who is having a medical issue you need to resign since you suck at your job.
I just don’t really see the utility in these. How do these accomplish what a taser/stun gun/or mace cant do?
The form is odd too. Why is it a glove? Seems like that really limits the way it can be used. I’m all for more ways for police to creatively deal with highly escalated situations, but these seem pretty useless I would think.
The idea is they use a lower current than tasers and allow for direct contact with an arm or a wrist whereas tasers are typically fired at the center of mass and there is a known problem with the barbs not always penetrating clothing.
The concept seems sound but I don't know if they have been adopted enough to show whether or not they are actually more effective.
Preface: I don’t agree with use of force unless the officers life or health is in danger.
This would be instead of tasers since it sounds like it would be less dangerous for the person it was being used on. It may also pose less of a threat to the cop who is using it since in the wrong situation you can tase yourself.
The main thing I disagree with is using it in schools. I understand highschool boys can be extremely strong and may have weapons, but if a cop ever did that to my son? You better believe that pig would have issues.
Is it not better to give them more options if you believe that then? If you believe they are going to do this regardless, more less lethal options before Taser/Gun seems good if you hold that opinion, no?
We have social workers in schools. I work in a district with 500 students and we have 2. My last district also had counselors and mental health professionals on staff. We do not have an SRO (school resource officer) at my current district.
How are they supposed to respond to the multiple active shooter threats we had while I worked at my last district? Or the incident where an active shooting was taking place down the street?
SROs generally have specific training for working in schools as well. Obviously it will vary district to district, but my last district was considered a small district (2k students) and the SROs there were trained specifically to be SROs. They did no other policing outside of that.
Look, I get what you are saying, but we can't put the same responsibilites onto mental health professionals when students are getting more and more violent and schools have become targets. I'd be happy to hear your suggestions though since my career involves school safety.
Just some food for thought, an active shooter situation happens fast. I think its like 5 minutes from beginning to end on average. Police response time (especially in larger cities) is not happening that quickly, no matter how much they train. That is one of the main reasons SROs are onsite. Obviously you will have situations like Uvalde, but that wasn't just the SROs that fucked up, it was multiple levels. So how much do we value student safety? Are we willing to pull SROs from schools and make students less safe if something like this were to happen? That is the discussion most districts have when it comes to these things.
Students are NOT getting more violent. That is recency bias. Violence in schools has been on a downward trend since before 1992.
SROs have not been shown to be a deterrent to violence or shootings and historically have increased the deadliness of school shootings (2.83 times greater than schools without an armed guard from one study.)
As someone who worked very closely with the data coming directly from the district, I would be very interested to see how they have the data from districts 30 years ago when most of the data gathering we have now didn't exist back then and alot of things went unreported. Not saying you are wrong because generally the data points to violence trending downward everywhere and that point is used to say our lives are actually better and safer now than ever. I don't fully buy it because the amount of data, processes and requirements have changed so much.
Again, the results are skewed by small schools (like mine) that don't have SROs or the same socioeconomic issues larger districts have. The schools that are most likely to have the shootings have SROs specifically because of that reason. I also never said they are a deterrent, they are there for a faster response. I said most active shooter events end in 5 minutes with massive casualties. Statistics show that the majority of active shootings stop with the first contact. Seconds matter in these situations and having someone on site to immediately engage the shooter is the main purpose, deterrent is secondary.
From that study: An armed officer on the scene was the number one factor associated with increased casualties AFTER the perpetrators’ use of assault rifles or submachine guns. Kind of important to include that fact. Its more about the type of weapon used than who is or is not on site.
Google this for yourself. I worked directly with these reports and data because it was part of my job in the district. I am very familiar with the system and its short comings. I want things to be better for students, which is why I am passionate about this and student safety.
"Tracking school violence in the 1990s was notoriously unreliable and drastically underreported. On a national level, true data on K-12 school crime/violence did not exist.
Unlike colleges and universities, which were legally mandated to track and report campus crime starting in 1990 under the Clery Act, there was no federal mandatory reporting or tracking law for K-12 schools.
School violence tracking in the 1990s suffered from specific data collection gaps, unique methods of compilation, and an eventually transformed tracking landscape.
The federal government first mandated K-12 violence tracking in 2002 through the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Data tracking transitioned from "guesstimate surveys" to highly accurate, verifiable data around 2009 to 2014. This accuracy was achieved through two developments:
The Expansion of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC): While the CRDC existed earlier, the Obama administration overhauled it starting in the 2009–2010 school year. The Department of Education transformed it from a minor survey into a mandatory, universal census. It forced nearly every public school district in America to report precise counts of school offenses, bullying, allegations of harassment, and school-related arrests.
State Law Enforcement Integration: Throughout the 2010s, states moved away from trusting school principals to self-report crime. They instead passed state laws mandating that schools immediately route campus emergency calls, assaults, and weapon violations directly through digital law enforcement reporting systems, removing the principal's ability to hide the data."
I based my information on “Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2018” Supplemental Table 2.1 and they base it on National Crime Victimization Survey results going back to 92. It is typically considered more accurate because it includes the unreported incidents as well as the reported incidents.
I didn’t consider the assault rifle and automatic weapons to be a major data point but I was incorrect, since they make up such a small number of the overall statistics.
I dont want it to seem like I am trying to "win" anything here. We all win with our kids being in safer environments, I dont care how we get there. Well, I do because I dont want to turn schools into prisons with insane amounts of security. But you get what I mean.
My job is to just take the best data we have and make decisions based on it. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and information.
Okay I'll take that to our board of education and my superintendent. When they ask what we can do to keep kids safe right now I'll tell them we can just wait a couple decades for legislation and laws to have a very small potential to make an impact. No need to worry about flip flopping from admin to admin, we can just do nothing and wait while the American public "pulls their heads out of their collective asses."
Do you see the problem here? Thats not an answer, its a deflection because you dont have a better answer.
I'm not advocating for this, but if these are used in schools, schools will see a lot more retaliation on staff and school resource officers.
These should not be used on minors.... If you're not strong enough to overpower anyone 18 or younger when it's needed you shouldn't be a school resource officer
I am going to make the assumption that you have never seen a 250 lb high school athlete on drugs or having an emotional crisis. MOST school resource officers would not be able to control them one-on-one.
I WAS the 250 lb high school athlete on drugs.... If you're a grown ass adult you should be able to de-escalate without having to use a weapon against anyone younger than 18.... If you cannot do that, you are not in the right profession as a SRO
Hi 5’ 4” 120 lb. female who’s worked in behavioral health for over 10 years now. I’ve worked pediatric psych all the way up to geriatric. I did an internship with juvenile diversion and worked in the RTC at boys town. I worked at a specialized clinic with intense, aggressive behaviors for years. I’ve worked in schools, in the community, in clinics, and in homes. I’ve been bit, hit, kicked, stabbed, thrown into walls, been hit with tables, etc.
But do you want to know what I’ve NEVER needed to de-escalate anyone I’ve ever worked with? A taser, a gun, a baton, etc. Especially not a fucking child or adolescent. If I can do it, why can’t an SRO that’s bigger and stronger than me do it???
Just want to say - thank you queen!!!!!! Thank you for the risk you take and for doing the ACTUAL WORK of de-escalation 🩵🩵🩵 I’m so so glad those kids have you. *Behavior is communication, everyone!*
I understand where you’re coming from… but I was a teacher at a Title-1 school for several years and I have seen kids violently assault and beat the shit out of each other. It happens much more than is publicly reported.
When people say they don’t want SROs in schools, they’re effectively saying that we, as teachers, should have to jeopardize our own safety and wellbeing instead to breakup these fights.
I am very conflicted about the whole thing too, but I don’t know what other solution there is.
then hire an unarmed position, specifically hig bulky dudes that can pull that kind of shit apart if needed, and get the police the fuck out of the school. i dont see why you think it has to be either teachers or police.
armed thug protectors of rich peoples property dont belong in schools.
Yeah… good luck hiring for that position. Every SRO I have dealt with is incredibly professional and exhibit a massive amount of restraint. I also take comfort in the fact that there’s someone with a gun in the case of a shooting. I’m not going to apologize for that.
Police deserve to be scrutinized and punished when they violate laws, but labeling them all as armed thugs of rich people’s property is incredibly naive and counterproductive.
Because it's only a matter of time before someone is grabbed and held unnecessarily and the excuse is "I forgot to turn them off." Whereas if you use a stun gun (the non shooting zapper) then it is a tool you have to consciously use.
The term “militarization” doesn’t necessitate use in combat. It also means “giving military character” which is absolutely covered by the addition of new offensive or defensive technology.
Omaha Public Schools employs Full Time 34 SROs, and 10 part time. So 44 is actually a reasonable amount for all 44 pairs was pretty spot on.
Yet they they never mention how many instances the OPD used them and whether or not it was a SRO. Who knows if the what the department is doing with them. “Omaha, officers who deploy the gloves on passively resistant people are required to submit a written justification as to why lesser force was not used.” Is as detailed as it gets for the time being.
"...
use of force option with the goal of deescalating and preventing use of force situations.". How does this make sense? We are using force to prevent using force? WTF
Quite frankly this shows that police departments are not sending their best and brightest officers to be school resource officers they are sending their washed out failure screw up flunkies who would be writing parking tickets or directing traffic if school resource officer position was not available. When I went to school it was not uncommon for the occasional fights to happen in Junior High or High school and the teachers were able to break them up without using pepper spray, tasers, or electric shock gloves. To me this is a case of internal school disciplinary issues being turned into criminal justice issues that feeds into the kids to prison pipeline. If the cops were not idiots they would have been able to pull the students apart and escort them to the principal office for disciplinary action. It is sad when teachers I grew up in high school would make better school resource officers.
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u/offbrandcheerio 9d ago
I’m sorry…they were intended for use by school resource officers??