The Coward's Handshake

ICE agents are about to get electric-shock gloves—ideal for 'smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers,' says an ex-cop 

Edited by Sam Thielman

AS SOON AS Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is set to issue a no-bid contract for tactical gloves that deliver electric shocks to people an ICE officer grabs.

This ghoulish weapon is the direct result of the additional $145 billion shoveled into DHS—$75 billion under last year's Big Beautiful Bill, $70 billion more this June—by the Republican Congress over Democratic opposition. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer's attempt, post-Minnesota, to impose some manner of "reform" on the lawless agency achieved nothing. Now DHS won't have to seek funding for years, making them both flush with cash and reprieving them from the usual legislative vehicles that, on paper at least, impose accountability. 

Last night, the Associated Press reported what DHS plans to do with a portion of its windfall. According to a federal contract solicitation, DHS wants to spend $20 million for "thousands" of pairs of the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, "known as the G.L.O.V.E." The lucky recipient of this money is a manufacturer out of Lexington, Kentucky, with the totally-not-fascist-sounding name Compliant Technologies LLC. The G.L.O.V.E. is already in use "by some jails and police departments," the AP ominously notes, a usage backed up by Compliant's website. [If you are groaning at Compliant Technologies LLC’s shit, please also remember that TASER stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.—Sam.]

Compliant declared itself "unfortunately…unable to speak on this subject" to the AP. But you can see the G.L.O.V.E. advertised on its website. They look like heavy winter gloves. But at the push of a button, once they make contact with someone's skin, they "deliver a pain stimulus that typically helps an officer gain compliance within seconds," the AP says. The G.L.O.V.E.'s user manual says it "stimulates the sensory portion of the Peripheral Nervous Systems which inhibits/distracts the subject from performing coordinated muscle movement, thus achieving Neuro-Peripheral Interference (NPI)."

Here's a demo video from Compliant's YouTube page: 

"Compliance" is the juice here. The video above shows a cop fantasy about a bystander approaching a cop, which is the opposite of how most police confrontations occur, but is helpful for the police narrative of using force only reluctantly or as a last resort.

“It’s immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting,” John Peters, told the AP. (His organization makes him sound like a police critic, but Peters is like a police critic but is actually an ex-cop and deputy sheriff, per his institute's website.) Which ICE agents are most likely to benefit from the G.L.O.V.E.? "For smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers, I think it has a great advantage," Peters says.

Why should the small, the weak and the elderly miss their chance to administer low-grade torture? After all, that's who ICE is hiring. Call the G.L.O.V.E. the Coward's Handshake. 

Compliant says prominently on its website that the electric charge it administers is localized—it doesn't spread throughout the central nervous system—and doesn't "directly affect cardiac rhythms." You have to read halfway through the user manual to find this warning: 

CD3s [the family of technologies to which the G.LO.V.E. belongs] may increase the affects [sic] that can cause sudden death including physiological changes with:

Increase in blood pressure

• Changes in blood chemistry

• Increase in respiration and heart rates

• Changes in heart rhythm

• Increase in Adrenaline

• The longer the CD3 exposure, the greater the potential risk

My emphasis. The manual recommends users administer "approximately 15 seconds duration" of shock, but the videos Compliant releases show people immediately yielding to the G.L.O.V.E.

ICE WILL INEVITABLY use the G.L.O.V.E. on the migrants it kidnaps, as well as on protesters and anyone they deem to be in their way. Compliant LLC says the G.L.O.V.E. shouldn't be used on people just for exhibiting "verbal defiance or belligerence," which is a statement delivered with a wink and a nod, given who its customer base is. (Look at the merch they offer.)

Watch this ICE agent in Falls Church, Virginia draw his gun and immediately lie that a woman who showed them appropriate disrespect was trying to hit him with her car—just like his colleagues in Customs and Border Protection lied about Chicagoan Marimar Martinez using her car as a weapon, just like his ICE colleagues lied about Renee Good and Alex Pretti posing threats to officers. That's who's about to wield a weapon whose forensic fingerprints are deniable and disputable. The ACLU's Jenn Rolnick Borchetta insightfully observes that the low-grade electric shocks from the G.LO.V.E. won't leave evidence that they were ever used. The user manual specifically states that the G.L.O.V.E. has a removable SD card that records each usage. Shame if that were to go missing! 

Should the Coward's Handshake receive a due level of media attention, it will come with apologists who claim the G.L.O.V.E. is an alternative to lethal force. Someone will say that Renee Good would still be alive if Jonathan Ross had been wearing it. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the terribly-named "less-lethal" law-enforcement/military technologies. The "less-lethals" are part of a continuum of employed force, not an alternative to lethal force. I used to report on a lot of these. 

Finally, here's a section of the G.L.O.V.E. user manual that seems ominously like a prologue: 

Medical and Product research studies have been conducted and these findings have concluded that, when used properly and within legal limits, agency policies, and along with sound TTPs, these devices pose no immediate threat or significant health risk to the general population. However, Compliant Technologies recommends avoiding use of these devices on the following higher risk portions of the population:

• The elderly

• Small children

• Pregnant women

• The severely handicapped

This warning seems to promise the headlines of tomorrow once ICE's oldest, smallest and weakest get their comic-book villain gloves and administer the Coward's Handshake.