5 reasons why ICE's new Tactical Electric Jazz Hands will not work

The latest dystopian news from our dystopian hellscape: Meet the G.L.O.V.E.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals. [...]

The devices are known as the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.

The Associated Press reports ICE will be spending "up to $20 million" for thousands of G.L.O.V.E.s, which means that the next time ICE tries to shock and awe an American city into white nationalist compliance, they will be doing it with these new battery-powered Tactical Jazz Hands. (The devices seem to be the glove version of tasers, or something close to it. Rather than shooting conductive needles into "resisting" American grandmothers from a safe distance away, you flip a switch, walk up to them, and grab them to make the connection.)

So—good news, everybody—we now have advance notice of one of the next ICE failures many months before it happens. We can know, with near-certainty, that Operation Pimp Slap here will be a quickly-abandoned boondoggle. It's obvious. Here are just a few of the reasons why they'll either be shredding all of these devices or irresponsibly selling them off to government surplus stores within 6 months of receiving them.

1 - Rampant misuse

It seems to be categorically impossible for ICE agents to read directions; it is possible that few of them have learned to read at all. Every last "non-lethal" weapon that has been put into their hands has primarily become a new way to attack protesters for funsies. Praying religious leaders are met with pepper balls to the face. Families trying to leave ICE perimeters get tear gas canisters shot into their cars.

You'll probably recall that one of of the big emerging scandals that helped drive former DHS "commander-at-large" Greg Bovino, aka the Keebler Nazi, aka Rommel Smurf, out of his job was the growing photographic documentation of members of his own personal firing pepper balls into people's faces from literal point-blank range, something that was going to kill someone sooner or later just as ICE has used other to permanently blind and maim civilians in their way.

If you give these near-illiterate roided-up militia wannabes Tactical Jazz Hands, they are going to go out of their way to use their Tactical Jazz Hands—even if it means provoking new confrontations so that they have targets.

2 - Tactical Jazz Hands are a close-quarters combat device

And we mean close quarters. Pepper balls can be fired from, if you're one of Rommel Smurf's personal goons, several feet away. Even a baton by definition exists so that officers can club someone from slightly out of that person's own reach. To use Tactical Jazz Hands, though, you have to be physically touching the target. You have to be touching their skin, not just their clothes, which means our steroid olympics runners-up will probably as often as not be trying to grab people by the face, during these "non-lethal" confrontations.

You, as an officer, have to grab them with your battery-powered Dom Glove, which means your face needs to be precisely at the optimal punching distance for anyone who doesn't want you to do that. The whole premise of the gloves are to force someone to comply with you by inflicting severe physical pain on them, and the involuntary reaction most people have to sudden severe physical pain is the fight-or-flight reflex—and flight's been taken off the table.

Given that, there are no circumstances in which these hypermilitarized would-be SEAL teams can use these things either on the streets or during arrests except as (1) a torture device that (2) causes a possibly violent reflexive response that (3) the rest of the ICE team will then use to shoot their victim dead, which is precisely what happened to Alex Pretti last January.

The manufacturer says these things are designed for jailhouse and prisoner transport: people who "are refusing to get into squad cars," for example. But ICE agents on the streets will not differentiate between manufacturer-recommended and grotesquely un-recommended use because, again, they are illiterate.

3 - Tactical Jazz Hands are not intimidating, and ICE will hate that

ICE agents attempting to use these things in the normal course of their rounds, which involves hunting for ethnic-looking people, crashing their cars into the ethnic-looking people, and then attempting to escape the angry crowds of literate people who are pissed off that ICE is doing that to anyone, much less doing it in their neighborhood and on their street and yards from where their children were just playing, will quickly find out that waving their Tactical Jazz Hands at people will not, in any situation, result in the situation getting better.

Most less-than-lethal devices are, by design or coincidence, either gun-shaped or grenade-shaped. When they are pointed in your direction, no matter how angry you might be you'll still hesitate when some dude in military gear with no law enforcement identification patches that can't be purchased on eBay points something that looks exactly like a gun in your direction. It has an intimidating effect, which is why ICE likes to do it so much.

Tactical Jazz Hands are not intimidating. Nobody on the scene will even know what they are; to them, it just looks like another part of your eBay-purchased setup. Just imagine you're part of a gathering crowd angry that ICE just smashed another of their rented vehicles into somebody's Honda, and some guy starts performatively waving his hands at you.

"What's that guy doing, Jerry?"

"Not sure. I think he's doing the mime in a box routine?"

"God, first they start killing people, now they're sending mimes. Pretty crappy mime though, he's yelling stuff through his whole routine."

"YOU CAN DO IT, ICE MIME! FIND THAT INVISIBLE DOORKNOB!"

So first a team of ten unknown militants causes a traffic accident in front of your house, then they brutalize whichever college-age kid or random housewife-looking victim they pull out of the other car, then even more agents arrive and all start yelling at you for looking at them, and then some guy puts on a pair of gloves and starts doing a mime routine while staring right at you.

What a great way to ensure the crowd is in a full-blown rage. Sure, great, do mime routines at them with your Dom Gloves, that'll work.

4 - Antifa countermeasures will be too sexy

Do you want anti-ICE protesters to start showing up in full-body rubber gimp suits? Because this is how you're going to get anti-ICE protesters showing up in full-body rubber gimp suits. I don't think an agency that couldn't stomach dancing inflatable frogs is going to be able to handle that one.

5 - Friendly fire

ICE would of course be unwilling to give up their Tactical Jazz Hands just because officers were uniformly using them as torture-slash-escalation devices. Nobody got disciplined for maiming people with stun grenades or shooting praying religious leaders with pepper balls for the apparent fun of it. Nobody still at ICE gives a crap about that stuff.

But what's really going to do the whole program in is that these things have an on/off switch, and as we've seen from every other supposedly less-than-lethal device the only people who sign up to be with ICE are either illiterate or are congenitally incapable of following instructions, and of all the form factors a device can take, "glove that electrocutes whatever you touch unless you remember to turn it back off" is among the poorest choices available for handing out to a crowd like that.

Within the first few weeks, we will begin to see that no, these agents will not remember to turn their G.L.O.V.E.s off after threatening people with them.

"Nice job crashing into that mom's Honda, Rick! High five!"

"AAAGH!"

Federal agents semi-regularly tase themselves, or accidentally discharge their guns, or shoot themselves in the sensitive body parts with their guns, or shoot their tear gas grenades too close to themselves or to other law enforcement officers working on the other side of their targets, and God knows none of them seem to be able to drive worth a damn, and you're giving them a wearable device that shocks people if you forget to turn it off.

Reaching for a car door. Reaching for a doorknob on a door that somebody else is reaching for from the other side. Heading into the bathroom after a long day of electrocuting Midwestern moms.

Yeah. Yeah, they're going to come to hate these damn things.

I understand why ICE wants Tactical Jazz Hands, I really do. The whole agency seems to be modeled on supervillain movies, and supervillains seem incapable of just handing their henchmen normal-ass gear instead of dressing them up in weird costumes and kitting them out with freakish themed weapons like "what if you all had birds on your shoulders, and they were trained birds that would fly at whoever you pointed at, and also the birds were stuffed with explosives" or similar.

Sure, yeah, I can see the Bond plot now. "Oh-oh, evil supervillain Handfinger, you think your volcano lair filled with electroglove-wielding meatheads is impregnable— but none of it was a match for my keen wit, my impossible action moves, and my MI6-provided full-body rubber gimp suit."

"I congratulate you, Mr. Bond, for making it this far. In fact, I really have to ... hand it to you."

"Shut up, shut up right now. I'm sweating buckets inside this damn suit and every moment you monologue is another moment I'm stick in this thing. You die now. And if any of your goons have touched my Aston Martin I'm going to come back and set your corpse on fire."

Yes, I understand why ICE wants these things. I think we all do.

I still give it six months before they junk every pair.