> I want the police to have a lot of options available to them, to avoid the “everything looks like a nail” problem.
That was the idea behind tasers - that they'd reduce use of guns.
In reality, they now get used in scenarios where less (or no) force used to be more normal. Why learn de-escalation techniques when you can just shoot a taser?
> A critical research question is whether officers can become too reliant on CEDs. During interviews with officers and trainers, the researchers heard comments that hinted at a "lazy cop syndrome." Some officers may turn to a CED too early in an encounter and may rely on a CED rather than on their conflict resolution skills or even on hands-on applications.
Setting aside the morality of these vs other force options, these run at $1650/pair if I’m reading it correctly - $66k for 40. Anyone else find it like an insane amount of money for a device that’s so simple?
Safe shock levels is a naive myth. What if the person had a pacemaker? What if they’re wet? What if one person is grabbed by the bicep and forearm, and another is grabbed by the chest and face? It’s completely impossible to assign one value, or even range, that’s both safe and effective for all commonplace variations.
Why is there a requirement to guarantee it safe? I don't believe that requirement exists for tasers, for example, which are just considered less lethal. Same for rubber bullets.
If you're selling it as a nonlethal weapon, you should somehow make certain it's not going to kill except by freak accident, and cannot be used to kill deliberately.
Sometimes something like a hulking Austrian body builder seems like a weird design for a human killing machine. Then real life suggests people may wear hairy gorilla suits to avoid pain compliance gloves during protests.
They're more for post-detainment torture. They'll keep shooting Black Bloc folks in the face from afar with 40mm tear gas canisters as they do currently.
> “In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on video, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”
Ah yes. This was the future they envisioned. Nothing cruel and unusual about this. Because it’s not “punishment” - just incidental assault during the booking process.
> method to gain control of a subject through pain compliance
> In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.”
> The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits.
> “In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on video, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”
Not really, because the whole idea is to have it used in discrete manner, a taser will be obvious and mostly recorded and shared online, plus once used there’s some time needed to reuse it again (the taser gun), those on the other hand, are discrete and can be used on multiple people quickly. The forced military draft will be “fun” to watch in the US!
And to that we can add "and it's schoolchildren."