Shock Gloves in Schools: A Measured Perspective

Shock gloves have emerged as a subject of considerable debate as of August 2026. Critics ask, as law professor Michael Mannheimer of Northern Kentucky University put it: “Will they use it more than they should? Will they jump over lesser forces that could be appropriate and successful to attain compliance and instead use the first?” The concern I immediately notice in such statements is their tendency toward sweeping, substantive generalizations. These devices are, quite literally, gloves: worn on an officer’s hands at all times unless someone decides to hurl one like a pancake. I recognize that most critics do not claim every use of a shock glove will prove negative or inexcusable, and I extend the benefit of the doubt to both readers and those critics. I personally despise all-encompassing vocabulary and universal claims. Declaring, for instance, that “all women are difficult to date” is an impossible assertion deployed chiefly for clicks, views, or commentary.

I therefore approach this topic from an honest, objective standpoint. The primary apprehension is that shock gloves may become a more immediate response when verbal de-escalation could have been the more appropriate course. I accept this premise. These tools must not devolve into a convenient shortcut that precedes genuine attempts at verbal de-escalation. That said, verbal de-escalation is not the panacea some appear to believe it is. At a certain point one must concede that physical force becomes inevitable.

This brings us to the first essential point: training is indispensable. In an earlier episode of the Dawn’s Early Light podcast, Cooper and I examined the idea of arming teachers. That is not the focus of this piece, so I will not rehearse every facet of that discussion. One conclusion, however, became immediately apparent: extensive background checks, additional screening, and rigorous training would be required. In the present case, these shock gloves are not being distributed to classroom teachers for dealing with rowdy students, nor are they being deployed in elementary schools where younger children are generally easier to manage. (I place “manage” in quotation marks because some take offense at the notion of control—yet teachers are charged with maintaining order in the classroom.) These devices are issued to school resource officers, many of whom are sworn police officers who have already received professional training, whatever one’s opinion of that training may be. I can speak from direct familiarity with local police agencies, which is where much of the current controversy originates, particularly as Omaha Public Schools resource officers appear to face a ready chorus of pitchforks and torches.

Turning to the local facts: Omaha Public Schools purchased forty pairs of shock gloves in May 2025 at a cost of approximately $65,000. The gloves have been available to Omaha Police Department school resource officers for roughly one full school year and have been used twice. Bellevue Public Schools acquired them even earlier. I recall receiving detailed information when they were first introduced there, though as of this writing I have been unable to determine whether they have been deployed in Bellevue schools. Given Bellevue’s substantially smaller size relative to Omaha, lower usage would be unsurprising. What, precisely, do these gloves do? Most police academies, including those in Bellevue and Omaha, require recruits to experience a full Taser deployment. The officer being shocked is typically supported by two colleagues while a third fires the device. The recipient is completely immobilized, often utters colorful language, and is lowered to the ground thoroughly incapacitated. By contrast, the demonstration video released by Omaha PD struck me as almost comical—especially after seeing it on Facebook amid more than two thousand largely negative comments. In the video, an officer sits gripping a chair in front of him. A second officer first tests the firmness of that grip, then activates the glove and simply grasps the seated officer’s arm. The grip is released at once, allowing easy manipulation and relocation of the limb. The difference between a full Taser exposure, requiring two additional officers merely to keep the subject upright, and a controlled grab that permits immediate physical redirection is striking.

Regarding the students involved, honesty is required. A five-star linebacker in his senior year of high school will outweigh, outperform, and outmaneuver the overwhelming majority of high-school teachers. This is not a facetious illustration; it is simply accurate. Reflecting on my own senior year, when I was already a legal adult, had weight-trained since freshman year, and played basketball, I recognize that my math teacher would have faced a formidable challenge had two or three of us decided we had endured one math assignment too many. The notion that these devices are being used primarily against “kids” therefore functions, at best, as a straw man.

Consider the numbers. In 2021, six percent of U.S. high-school students reported having been in a physical fight on school property—figures recorded during the COVID era when attendance was already depressed. These were reported physical altercations, not verbal disputes. In 2025, ten percent of public-school teachers reported being threatened with injury by a student, and four to six percent reported actual physical assault. Student-on-student and student-on-teacher violence is a tangible reality. In a typical public school employing dozens of teachers, a one-in-ten rate of threats or assaults is a sobering statistic. A National Institute of Justice study examining 962 real-world conducted-energy-device deployments across six police departments found that 99.7 percent of subjects experienced either no injury or only mild injuries; the remaining fraction sustained moderate or severe injuries. The NIJ rightly emphasizes that these devices are not risk-free—nothing is. One must immediately challenge the alternative. If opposition to shock gloves is absolute, what is the preferred response to a student who remains physically aggressive despite every de-escalation technique? Lethal force? Virtually no one would endorse that. A conventional Taser? As noted, that option is considerably more incapacitating and visually severe. Summoning four resource officers to dog-pile and peel a teenager off another student or teacher, with the attendant risk of exchanged blows? Shock gloves, by comparison, represent a more controlled and comparatively humane intermediate option. Another NIJ comparison found that agencies adopting conducted-energy devices experienced a 70 percent decrease in officer injuries and a 40 percent decrease in suspect injuries relative to periods without such tools. That constitutes a net positive.

My hope is that observers will step back from the political propaganda circulating on both sides. Not every student in Omaha Public Schools is a “thug” requiring shock intervention, nor are we consigning children to an electric chair. Law-enforcement officers are human beings as well. If these devices can reduce injuries to officers by 70 percent and to subjects by 40 percent, the conclusion that they offer a net benefit to public schools seems difficult to avoid.