ICE Is Getting $20M In Shock Gloves. Manual Warns They Can Cause Sudden Death.

Homeland Security is spending twenty million dollars to put electric shock gloves on thousands of ICE agents, and Markwayne Mullin’s department can post the no-bid paperwork as early as Friday.The Associated Press broke it Monday off a procurement notice. DHS calls them “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.” Distraction. Like jazz hands. De-escalation, at three hundred and eighty volts.The product is called the G.L.O.V.E. It’s an acronym. Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. Somebody in Lexington, Kentucky started with the word glove, worked backward until it spelled itself, and billed us for the afternoon.It looks like an ordinary patrol glove until the officer flips a switch. It has to touch bare skin and won’t go through clothing, which narrows the target area to your hands, your neck and your face.The manufacturer wrote a manual and it reads like a confession. Do not use as punishment. Do not use on someone only being verbally defiant. Do not use on children, pregnant women, the elderly or disabled people. No more than two gloves on one person. No more than fifteen seconds. Somebody tried three. That rule exists because somebody tried three.The company website warns it can raise your blood pressure, alter your blood chemistry, change your heart rhythm and increase effects that, quoting the sales page, “can cause sudden death.” No watchdog wrote that. They put the sudden death in the marketing.Here’s the oversight. The officer is supposed to announce “GLOVE on.” Out loud. Like a catchphrase. Like there’s a crowd. Twenty million in federal electricity, and the safeguard is a grown man hyping himself up in a stranger’s driveway.Now look at who’s getting them. ICE shot a United States citizen dead in Minnesota in January, and a Colombian man in Maine last month at a traffic stop. The Hill cites four hundred and twelve misuse-of-force incidents at immigration protests in one year. And two weeks ago we learned ICE releases body camera footage only when it serves ICE’s own “best interests.”So Mullin is buying a weapon that leaves no burn and no scar, for the agency that already decides when the camera exists. The ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta nailed it. Agents can deliver shocks “with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do.”John Peters studies these devices. He told the AP it feels like a bee sting, then said this to a reporter, on purpose. “For smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers, I think it has a great advantage.” Well thank goodness. Here I was thinking ICE had a judgment problem, when all along it was a grip strength gap.The AP asked Jeff Niklaus, who founded Compliant Technologies and runs it, to explain the sale. He emailed back, “Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject.” The compliance company will not comply.So read that do-not-use list one more time. Children. Pregnant women. The elderly. Disabled people. The manufacturer wrote down the four groups this thing must never touch, and Mullin bought twenty million dollars of it for the one agency in America that specializes in finding all four in the same parking lot.The paperwork posts Friday. No competing bids, no other companies, nobody voting on it.Sources:https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-85ff746d3e0ee5f39e7a9a3f1f576252https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6024004-dhs-ice-shock-gloves/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe