From 2011 to 2013, I commanded the New York City Police Department’s 6th Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village. We had a team of plainclothes officers who went out looking for serious crimes in progress. Sometimes they worked out of a dilapidated unmarked van that looked like the one driven by the villain in The Silence of the Lambs. When things were slow, the team would arrest people who had slunk off from Bleecker Street to smoke weed on Minetta Lane. The sergeant who led these officers had come down from the Bronx, and he thought there was a certain justice in holding the Village’s nightlife crowd to the same standard we held Black teenagers in Kingsbridge Heights.
One evening in 2012, the team noticed a woman smoking in the shadows and decided to make an arrest. The officers placed her in handcuffs, led her to the van, and opened its back doors. At the other end of the cargo bay, a burly man sat on a milk crate in the dark, waiting. The woman went weak in the knees, her eyes filled with panic, and she groaned. At that point the sergeant realized that the prisoner had no idea who these officers were. She was helpless and she was terrified.
Something like this scene has been playing out across America lately. Under orders from Donald Trump’s White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is aiming to deport 1 million immigrants a year, and to make 3,000 arrests a day. Agents have detained farmhands and meat processors; garment and construction workers; graduate students; the mayor of Newark, New Jersey; and people who turn out to be completely innocent. But if immigration enforcement is more aggressive and visible than in the past, it is also more anonymous: ICE allows its agents to conduct operations in plain clothes and to cover their faces. Social media is flooded with images of masked men in streetclothes forcing people into unmarked cars.
This approach looks scary. It is scary. And it’s a grave mistake. In keeping with the values of the local police, the federal government should prohibit the wearing of masks by its officers and require them to properly identify themselves. These are the minimal requirements of policing a free state—regardless of how you feel about the administration’s stance on immigration. You can support ambitious deportation targets without sanctioning anonymous policing.
The main reason federal agents give for wearing masks is their fear of doxxing: the practice of sharing a person’s identity and contact information with the malicious intent of targeting them for harassment, threats, and possibly violence. Federal agents and their families deserve privacy and safety, but the government already has a means of protecting them: It can enforce the laws against harassment and threats, online or in person. Or Congress could pass an existing bill that explicitly makes doxxing federal law-enforcement agents illegal.
At any rate, everyone in government today is vulnerable to doxxing, including countless public servants who have no option to hide their identity as they work. Should a pool of judges issue anonymous verdicts? Should legislators pass bills by secret ballot? The answers are obvious. Wearing a badge is thought to require, and should require, more bravery than serving on a state assembly. Our police should be the (literal) face of the nation’s courage, unafraid to show the public who they are.
Perhaps most important, wearing masks could expose federal agents, local police, and the public to physical dangers that make the risks of doxxing seem minor in comparison. Armed, masked men appear sinister, even predatory. Beyond obscuring the facial expressions we use for cues about whether a person is a threat, masks are a marker of criminals looking to intimidate their prey while avoiding identification. This is why the ski mask is a cultural trope of the armed robber or terrorist. It is also why masked protesters undermine their own causes; the masks arouse deep suspicion, as bystanders may assume the protesters are just waiting for an opportune moment to break the law. Nor is that a baseless assumption: In my experience, masked protesters sometimes are opportunistic lawbreakers.
As ICE agents rack up arrests on the road to 1 million deportations, someone will inevitably, instinctively fight back against the masked men forcing them into a car, not because they want to escape law enforcement but because they don’t know whom they are trying to escape from in the first place, and they legitimately fear for their safety. As a former police officer, I can tell you that my first reaction to unidentified men in masks converging on me or someone nearby would be to take cover and prepare to fight.
Another possible hazard is that masked, unidentified ICE agents could be mistaken by local police for armed felons committing a robbery or an abduction. Misidentified police officers taking enforcement action in plain clothes or off duty have been killed by fellow officers with a tragic regularity. Perhaps most dangerous of all, as ICE normalizes mask wearing, it creates the conditions for violent criminals to pass as police while escaping identification. In fact, criminals have already started to impersonate ICE agents.
Many people on the left, perennially skeptical of how our nation is policed, think masking by federal agents is wrong. But so does the right-libertarian CATO Institute, which recently published an argument critical of mask wearing. It asked, “At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?” A former FBI agent and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney have also spoken up against masking.
Police departments throughout the country understand these risks and require their officers to be clearly identifiable by face, name, and agency. Until earlier this century, the NYPD restricted its officers’ winter headwear to an archaic mouton hat and earmuffs. In a nod to modernity, the NYPD relaxed this rule, allowing officers to wear a balaclava on patrol if the temperature was expected to drop below freezing. But the accompanying regulations clearly state that the balaclava must fully expose the officer’s face; with exceptions for the protective equipment worn by emergency-service officers during tactical operations, as well as for the use of gas masks, the NYPD has never permitted officers to obscure their face. In the same vein, except during undercover operations, all NYPD officers are required to “courteously and clearly” provide their name, rank, and shield number to anyone who requests it, either verbally or via a preprinted card with the information.
The driving principle here is obvious: In a free society, people should know who is policing them. To codify this sentiment in the law, New York legislators have proposed a ban on mask wearing by ICE agents, and California legislators have put forward a bill that would ban federal, state, and local police from wearing masks when interacting with the public. (The California bill exempts members of SWAT teams conducting tactical operations if a mask could reduce exposure to heat, fire, chemicals, and contaminants.) The legislation addresses a crucial issue, but it exemplifies the overkill of our times: We shouldn’t need a law to ensure a basic feature of transparent policing. Federal agencies should adopt this policy as a matter of course.
As a person who served as a police officer for 23 years, I never doubted that I practiced a noble profession. It is noble work in part because officers willingly take real risks for the sake of the greater good. When my boys were young, I used to tell them that I couldn’t guarantee that I would come home safe at the end of a shift—only that, if I were injured, it would be for a reason they could forever be proud of.
Hiding your face from the public as a federal agent undermines the legitimacy of our nation’s police, and can be mistaken for cowardice. Although the risks of showing your face as you police America’s streets are not negligible, they’re worth taking, because the consequences of concealment are more dire. This is why the hazards of policing are morally different from those of being, say, a lumberjack, even though felling trees is statistically more dangerous than making arrests. In policing a free society, some of the risks arise from protecting freedom itself, so even if you can reduce those risks, you often shouldn’t.
Descending on a person in public, laying hands on them, and taking them to a distant prison is a naked expression of state power. For it to be tolerated in a democracy committed to an inalienable right to liberty, it must be just that: naked. It cannot be done by shadowy, masked agents. That evening in Greenwich Village, in the quest for a weed arrest, my plainclothes sergeant would have been within his rights to haul off his prisoner in an unmarked van. But he also knew that much more was at issue than his prerogative to enforce the law. “We’re the NYPD,” he told the woman in handcuffs. “We’ll wait here until I call a marked car to the scene. Uniformed officers will explain who we are, and what’s going to happen. You’re safe with us.”
