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The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves
The "Conductive Distraction and De-escalation devices" manufactured by Compliant Technologies can cause a person to drop to the ground in pain with one touch.Mother Jones illustration; GLOVE user manual/Compliant Technologies
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In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.”
The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits.
“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”
The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them.
The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock.
Nelson County, Ky., jailer Justin Hall shows an electric shock glove that is used at his facility, Thursday, Aug. 13, in Bardstown, Ky. Dylan Lovan/AP
“We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws.
The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.” Some police departments that use the devices issue guidance saying they shouldn’t be deployed against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles. A 2021 user manual for the GLOVE notes that it can cause an “increase in blood pressure” and “changes in heart rhythm,” and recommends that users avoid shocking “those with obvious health conditions.” The manual also includes a graphic saying “evil is powerless when the good are unafraid,” laid over a Blue Lives Matter flag.
“How in the world is ICE just going to be walking around with these gloves?” Rizvi asked. “It is inherently harmful. It has no legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
“Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told _Mother Jones_ ; Compliant Technologies did not respond to a request for comment. The devices “will be issued to Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers and agents,” according to a notice DHS published August 10. They will be delivered by the end of March 2027.
Compliant Technologies was founded in 2018 by Jeff Niklaus, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and Somalia, who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military.
In an interview with the International Law Enforcement Educators & Trainers Association last month, Niklaus said he was inspired to start his company after participating in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, on which the book _Black Hawk Down_ is based.
“If you look at the why…I mean, we lost 18 guys in one day,” Niklaus said. (Hundreds of Somali people were killed on that day, alongside 18 Americans.) “So, for me personally, if we can help save or stop the injury of at least 18 people, then I feel like we did something as a company,” he said.
But his technology has also hurt people. A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported. And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter.
But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves—in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”
