The glove of power by Jennifer Stephenson

 

 

It is disturbing to think that an immigration officer being handed a glove that can deliver an electric shock. Not because the device is necessarily the most lethal instrument in the government’s arsenal. It is not. The problem is what it says about the direction of American law enforcement: when an agency entrusted with enforcing immigration law begins to look increasingly like a domestic security force, the addition of an electrified glove is less a technological innovation than a political symbol.

ICE has now awarded a $16.7 million contract for 6,000 pairs of electric-shock gloves, despite objections from lawmakers and civil-liberties advocates. The government describes them as “conductive distraction and de-escalation” devices. That is the sort of phrase bureaucracies invent when they want something potentially ugly to sound reassuring.

One can imagine the procurement meeting. Someone asks whether agents really need gloves capable of shocking people. Someone else explains that the gloves are not weapons but safety equipment. Another official probably nods gravely and writes down “de-escalation.”

And there we have the problem. A democratic government should be extremely cautious about giving its agents new ways to inflict pain. It should be even more cautious when those agents operate in communities, enter homes, detain people and exercise enormous power over individuals who may have little practical ability to resist.

ICE insists that the gloves are intended for difficult confrontations and officer safety. Fine. Police officers sometimes face genuinely dangerous situations. They deserve equipment that protects them. But the legitimate question is not whether an officer should have means of protecting himself. It is whether an institution already under intense scrutiny for its use of force should be expanding the menu of coercive tools before establishing overwhelming public confidence that those tools will be used properly.

That distinction matters. The danger of authoritarianism rarely arrives wearing a sign saying WELCOME TO THE DICTATORSHIP. It arrives through procurement contracts, administrative rules, expanded powers and seemingly technical improvements. Each individual change can be defended as reasonable. Together they can produce something profoundly unreasonable.

The electric glove is therefore important not because it turns an ICE officer into a storm trooper. It does not. Nor does every ICE officer become a thug simply by putting one on. That would be lazy caricature.

The concern is institutional. When an agency increasingly resembles a militarized domestic force, equipment begins to influence mentality. The symbolism of the uniform, tactical gear and weaponry matters. So does the expectation that confrontation, rather than restraint, is the normal answer to resistance. Critics have already described ICE as acquiring the characteristics of a paramilitary organization, with concerns about accountability and oversight.

America should understand the historical lesson here. Praetorian forces are not created overnight. They emerge when governments gradually become comfortable giving particular agents extraordinary authority and then become less comfortable questioning how that authority is exercised.

The republic does not become authoritarian because someone buys a glove. It becomes vulnerable when nobody thinks the glove is worth arguing about. There is a profound difference between law enforcement and enforcement without meaningful restraint. The first serves the law. The second eventually serves whoever controls the machinery of enforcement.

That is why the image of the electrified glove should make Americans uncomfortable. A democracy should want its police to be feared by criminals because they enforce the law, not feared by ordinary people because the state has given them increasingly ingenious ways to make citizens obey. The glove may be marketed as nonlethal. The warning it carries is anything but.