Shock gloves for school police in Omaha

If you watched the news this week, a Kentucky company called “Compliant Technologies” makes an electro-shock glove designed for prisons, police, and military uses. The company got a $20M contract to provide these gloves (G.L.O.V.E. or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) to federal immigration agents.

What didn’t make national news is the Omaha Police Department already purchased 40 pairs of these same $1,625 shock gloves for school resource officers in 29 high schools and middle schools. Officers have already used the shock gloves on school children twice!

If this video wasn’t disturbing enough, notice how the founder of the shock glove company chuckles after the officer screams and hits the ground. He also adds that in the real world we don’t just let people fall…which means they continue to hold and shock a victim until they are laying on the ground.

These shock gloves will be used at 34 schools in the Omaha, Westside, Millard, and Elkhorn public school districts by the end of the 2026-27 school year.

“What we’ve seen thus far is immediate compliance,” Omaha Officer Jason Cvitanov (also the CEO of a private police training company) said. “That’s a benefit to everyone involved, because it is such a low level of force being utilized by officers, which is the goal in every situation.”

The gloves have a battery pack in the wrist that “generates up to 380 volts of electrical pulses through direct skin contact to force individual compliance”. For comparison, a normal electrical outlet is 110 volts and every parent installs outlet covers to keep little kids from accidentally touching them. Meanwhile, the police officers inside an Omaha school might touch a kid with 3x that voltage.

I’m shocked anyone in the school system would approve the purchase and use of these gloves because the company’s operating manual linked on the company website explicitly warns that these gloves should not be used on children. United States common law and the US Department of Justice define anyone under 18-years-old as a child. “Small children” is not a legally recognized term.

Most schools have hard tile floors in hallways and classrooms. The user manual also warns about “serious fall injuries due to device application”. During the video demonstration, the officer who is shocked is standing and falls on a soft wrestling mat. When an officer shocks a student, the kid is going to fall on a hard floor.

Omaha is spending more than a teacher’s salary to give school police a weapon that is explicitly not designed for use on children and can cause death/serious injury to students. I would normally write a couple paragraphs as a conclusion, but I don’t think there is anything else to say.

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.