The shock gloves immigration agents could soon use to control detainees and protesters worked so powerfully during a military exercise that participants felt intense pain, stopped fighting immediately and feared additional exposures, according to a previously unreleased Army study.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders were aware of the findings before signing a $16.7 million contract to purchase 6,000 pairs of shock gloves in August, according to records obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and shared with The Associated Press.

The shocks had a profound impact on Army employees who played the role of combative prisoners during the exercise, which took place at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in October 2024. The participants, several of whom were large-statured men, stopped resisting seconds after officers applied shocks by touching gloves to their skin, and were left with “fatigue, soreness and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again,” the study found.

  • stephen@lazysoci.al
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    6 hours ago

    I’d thought these outcomes were the intended purposes of applying the gloves to another human being.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      that is the purpose.

      The gloves aren’t even designed to incapacitate, they’re purely for pain compliance. for ESD’s to actually incapacitate someone, the probes or contacts need to spaced sufficiently far apart to pass through major muscle groups, which is why taser models are only effective at certain ranges.

      keep in mind the Army is not in the province of pain compliance. Their sole goal is to kill as efficiently and quickly as possible so things that don’t actually do that … well… not exactly something they’re going to care about.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Yeah…

      That’s why they bought them after the trial…

      The point of documenting it, is purchase orders like that are filled with people’s names. Low rank people who would 100% snitch to avoid being the fall guys.

      Even if they don’t snitch, it’s not hard to follow a chain of command.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        The point of documenting it, is purchase orders like that are filled with people’s names. Low rank people who would 100% snitch to avoid being the fall guys.

        Even if they don’t snitch, it’s not hard to follow a chain of command.

        And who exactly is going to “follow the chain of command” and do something about it? It’s not as if we have an opposition party in the US. We have fascist and diet fascist