Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.
The decision affecting most Omaha middle and high schools came after The Associated Press first revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers the gloves, which are known as G.L.O.V.E.s or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters. The devices have also been used in recent years by some jails.
Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray requested that police working in the schools, known as school resource officers, stop using the gloves. Omaha Police agreed.
I’d rather police stationed in schools not be armed at all. Uvalde showed it didn’t matter for an actual shooting if they were armed. Hell, we don’t need cops in schools in the first place.
Out all together. The reason for putting them in was to have an immediate response to a shooter. The actual effect is that students, with a very noticeable racial bias, are getting arrested for things that should be an in school issue. And they are doing same crap that we see cops doing in the streets.
Id rather police not be stationed in schools. The US is legit the worst developed country.
Yeah, more guns in schools always seemed like a dumb answer to any problem.
But it’s 'Murica
It’s all they know
Not sure why police are needed at schools at all. I can’t think of many European schools that have armed officers at schools and they seem to have a whole lot less issues than US schools soooo.
From my experience, the cop in the school is probably the most guilty person. Back when I was in high school, the cop never stopped a single fight or a single theft. He did target the non-white kids, confiscate their weed, and then sell it to the white preppy kids. When the precinct bought a mustang for him (why…) he decided to “showoff” and then went speeding down the middle lane (the turn lane) when school got out but didn’t slow down in time so when he got to the corner (tight curve, probably thought the car would magically handle it) he hit sand (it was early spring, so sand due to snow) and lost control, jumped the curb and crashed it into a fence and sat there in shame as students he almost hit drove by. He was just a few cars away from me when it happened, I got to watch it firsthand.
School was less safe, legitimately, because there was a cop on site.
Uvalde was an absolute shit-show, and it’s a travesty of justice that those larping bastards didn’t face any criminal consequences for their negligent inaction. The anguish they wreaked by their cowardice on the children and families of that community should be revisited one-hundred-fold every second of their miserable lives.
That said…
The School Resource Officer programs are a different animal. A good, effective SRO is a community member of the school. He or she is there to partner with kids, teachers, administrators, and parents. They are there to prevent, de-escalate, and deter. The ones that are good at building rapport with the kids are effective at identifying kids in danger, in trouble, or on a pathway to violence.
And in the good school systems, the SROs are integral parts of the Behavioral Threat Assessment Teams, making sure that any indicators of violent intent is taken seriously and assessed by a multidisciplinary team following a clinically validated process.
In a lot of instances, SROs are old-timers awaiting retirement, rookies that think every kid is part of a crime syndicate, a road cop that got stuck on a rotation that couldn’t give a shit, or something else besides a decent human being. But in many cases, even some of the shitty ones have intervened and stopped active assailants. And that’s a sad reality.
When I got called to the office for breaking some unwritten rule, the principal had the school cop looming over me. My school was a “good” school that excelled at nothing. An aggressively mediocre, middle of the road experience. The school’s cop had no presence other then being seen in the mornings or wandering around.
Maybe instead of having cops in schools, we should be asking ourselves why kids feel like they have nothing left to lose. Why they feel they have no future, no hope, no optimism.