When police officers in Oklahoma admitted to using electro-shock gloves to subdue two students over the 2025-2026 school year, the community was rightfully outraged. The incident came off the back of new reporting by the Guardian and 404 Media, which revealed that US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had placed a massive purchase order to procure its own arsenal of shock gloves, propelling the brutal policing gadgets into the national spotlight.
Despite their swift rise to infamy of late, the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters,” or GLOVEs, are anything but new. In a recent interview with the right-wing publication the Daily Wire, a police chief in the tiny town of Sahuarita, Arizona bragged that his officers have been using them for years.
A town of just over 37,000, Sahuarita maintains a standing police force of some 68 officers. Those cops, police chief John Noland crowed, have been electrocuting suspects for roughly two years at this point.
“In Arizona, we were the first law enforcement agency that does street work or patrol work to put them out,” Noland told the DW. “We’ve been successful with them.”
Though a United Nations special rapporteur on torture declared devices of this type “inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading,” the chief is unfazed. “It is not inhumane,” Noland asserted.
“Over the last few years of our federal agents, Border Patrol, ICE agents, and others, DHS, all struggling with people out in the field, trying to get them to comply, now becomes less of a struggle,” Noland added.
The issue, legal rights analysts have argued, is that this attitude reduces every citizen to an unruly criminal who simply needs to “comply.” It completely disregards the fact that these gloves will be abused by overzealous cops — indeed, they already are.
In 2025, a Kentucky man was killed after he was hit 27 times with a GLOVE by jail employees, on top of 13 jabs from a taser, which ultimately sent him into cardiac arrest.
With its own gnarly history of police misconduct, it may just be a matter of time before the city of Sahuarita experiences its own tragic death at the hands of the GLOVE.
More on shock gloves: Cop Used Electrocution Gloves to Subdue High School Student in Special Education Program
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