I taught arrest techniques and non-deadly force for a good part of my career, and I spent more than 24 years in immigration enforcement, finishing as deputy field office director for Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City. I now serve as a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project. Before all of that and alongside it, I spent over three decades in uniform, including running a theater internment facility at Camp Cropper in Baghdad. I have put hands on people who did not want hands put on them, and I have taught other people how to do it without anybody ending up in an ambulance.
So when I saw that this week’s outrage is a contract for gloves that deliver a low-voltage stimulus, my reaction was not alarm. It was recognition. We have been trying to solve this exact problem since before I pinned on a badge.
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The problem is simple. The most dangerous stretch in law enforcement is the gap between telling a man he is under arrest and getting cuffs on his wrists. If he complies, nothing happens. If he does not, an officer has to close the distance and physically overcome him. That is where officers get hurt and that is where subjects get hurt. The National Institute of Justice’s multiagency study of force outcomes found officers went hands-on in 76% of force incidents, that empty-hand physical force raised the odds of officer injury by 258%, and that subjects were injured in as many as 64% of incidents. Those numbers drove 50 years of equipment development, and not one person protesting this contract has an answer for them.
In the 1960s an officer had his voice, his hands, and a wooden stick. Then came CN and CS gas, then OC spray in the late ’80s, then the side-handle and expandable baton, then Graham v. Connor in 1989 giving us objective reasonableness as the standard. Then Jack Cover’s 1974 Taser concept matured into a commercial product and the conducted energy device became standard issue in more than 12,000 agencies. Every one of those steps was denounced when it arrived. Every one of them was a way of not hitting somebody.
The profession kept walking that road because the research kept validating it. NIJ’s expert panel concluded in 2011 that field use of conducted energy devices is safe in the vast majority of cases and creates less injury risk than the other available ways of subduing an uncooperative person. Comparative studies found a 70% drop in officer injuries. A medical review of 1,201 field deployments found no cardiac events.
So tell me what is novel here. The device requires direct skin contact. It runs a few hundred volts at negligible current, stimulating sensory nerves rather than locking up skeletal muscle. That is not a new category of force. It is the drive-stun function that has sat on the back of every Taser for two decades, minus the darts, minus barbed probes in a man’s chest, minus the uncontrolled fall from a body gone rigid. An officer wearing it keeps both hands on the subject and keeps controlling him. That is the entire point.
And this is where the argument collapses. These gloves are not new. Prisons, jails, hospitals managing combative patients, and more than 50 police departments across roughly 20 states have been buying them for years. Not one press conference. Not one report on the corrections officer in Oklahoma County working a housing unit with the same device on his hand. Not one senator demanding answers from a sheriff. The tool sat in American jails in silence until the moment ICE showed interest in it, and then it became a scandal overnight. That is not a safety concern. That is a search for the next reason to keep this agency in the headlines and paint the men and women who work there as something other than federal law enforcement officers doing a lawful job. The device did not change. The target of the campaign did.
ICE TO OUTFIT OFFICERS WITH ‘BEE STING’ ELECTROSHOCK GLOVES FOR COMBATIVE DETAINEES
Now let me explain what actually happens after an officer uses force, because the people writing these stories have never read a use-of-force report. Every application of force by an ICE officer is documented and logged. It moves up through the chain of command, and it is reviewed by the National Firearms and Tactical Training Unit, the entity that owns use-of-force policy, training, and certification for the agency. That review is where trends get caught, where an officer reaching for a tool too early gets identified, and where policy gets tightened. The glove will be handled no differently. ICE will adopt reporting requirements for it in accordance with its existing use-of-force policies, and guidance will go out to the field spelling out exactly when an activation is reportable. Officers will be certified and recertified on a fixed cycle before they are permitted to put one on. That is not a promise anyone has to take on faith. That is how this agency has fielded every intermediate weapon in its inventory.
Here is what nobody on the other side will say out loud. Take the glove away and the resistance does not stop. The arrest still has to be made. The officer still closes the distance. And then we are back to elbows and knees and a takedown on concrete, and the same people act shocked when it looks ugly on video.
Scott Mechkowski served more than 24 years in federal immigration enforcement, retiring as deputy field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City. He was a certified arrest techniques and non-deadly force instructor and served over 30 years in the military. He is a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project.
