The first six months of 2025 have included troubling developments for policing in the United States, reversing and rolling back any progress in recent years toward reform. As a former corrections officer, reserve police officer and police ethics instructor, I am not anti-police; rather, I am a proponent of just policing. By that, I mean law enforcement that is in accordance with the virtue and principle of justice. In calling for reform, I seek to help law enforcement officers to be and to do their very best as they serve and protect others in need, regardless of whether they are fellow citizens.
As I wrote in America almost exactly seven years ago, law enforcement officers—from the F.B.I. to the local police department—swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” rather than pledging allegiance to a president, a political party, a socioeconomic class or any ideological movement. So I am worried about the current backsliding toward a more aggressive and militarized model of law enforcement, as reflected when President Trump signed two executive orders promising to “unleash high-impact local police forces” and to increase law enforcement concerning undocumented residents or, as he refers to them, “criminal aliens.”
Mr. Trump also shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked police records documenting misconduct by law enforcement officers, such as excessive force. In addition, the Department of Justice has retracted its findings, made during the Biden administration, of unconstitutional policing, including racial discrimination, and rescinded the consent decrees overseeing police reforms in cities like Minneapolis.
As Radley Balko, author of the 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop, recently observed, Mr. Trump’s frequent use of the word unleash means “to remove from a restraint,” as evident in the “growing number of horrifying incidents in which federal agents, often concealing their identities with masks, have snatched innocent people from the streets, then whisked them off to detention centers hundreds of miles away or, worse yet, all the way to CECOT,” the notorious prison in El Salvador.
Especially alarming, in my view, is the wearing of masks, balaclavas and neck gaiters by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and assisting state and local law enforcement officers while apprehending undocumented individuals in their vehicles, homes and workplaces. Referring to the protests against these arrests in Los Angeles, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social that “from now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why???” But this question should also apply to law enforcement officers.
Dan Goldman, a Democratic congressman who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, recently said at a press conference that he had asked a group of ICE agents, “Why are you wearing a mask?” He stated that one agent responded, “Because it’s cold.” Although New York city police officers, for example, are allowed to wear a black balaclava while on patrol in the winter, this agent’s answer seems flippant.
Another officer admitted a desire to avoid being identified on video. Mr. Goldman said he followed this with a question: “If what you are doing is legitimate, is lawful, is totally above board, why do you need to cover your face?” It seems inconsistent to hold that it is not OK to wear a mask when protesting the government, but it is OK to wear a mask if you are an agent of the government.
Curiously, none of the dozens of books in my office on law enforcement ethics address the wearing of masks by officers, probably because the practice was rare until recently. On occasion, perhaps to avoid compromising their involvement in an undercover investigation, an officer might be permitted to wear one.
One of the main reasons given for law enforcement officers’ choice to wear masks is their (and their family’s) safety. When I worked as a corrections officer during the 1980s and as a reserve police officer during the early 2000s, I sometimes wished that people I encountered did not know my name or badge number. Even if I did nothing wrong to cause them to file a complaint, I worried that they might find my phone number or address and harass me or my family. Of course, that was before social media and online search engines, along with the possibility of doxxing. Back then I could decline having my address and number published in the telephone book. Those days are gone.
Still, the negative consequences of wearing masks outweigh this safety concern. For one thing, someone can more easily pose as a law enforcement officer to commit crimes. As one bystander to the ICE apprehension of the Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk shouted, “You want to take those masks off? Is this a kidnapping? Can I see some faces here? How do I know this is the police?” Indeed, in multiple states there have been arrests of people allegedly impersonating ICE agents for ulterior purposes.
Moreover, masks make it easier for law enforcement officers to act with impunity. Masked officers are less likely to be held accountable for their actions. Masks thus undermine trust between citizens and the police, and they amplify fear and anxiety among people in vulnerable communities. With local police and sheriff’s departments entering into agreements with ICE, many community leaders express the worry that any progress previously made toward police reform, community policing and constructive partnerships—all of which depends on trust—is being reversed. As Mari Blanco, assistant executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., told a public radio reporter, “It takes years to build that trust and seconds to destroy it.”
Masks bring to my mind the paramilitaries and death squads that seized people and made them “disappear” during the 1970s and 1980s in Chile, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and in El Salvador during the presidency of Jose Napoleón Duarte. “We’re seeing the rise of secret police—masked, no identifying info, even wearing army fatigues—grabbing & disappearing people,” California state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, wrote recently on X.
Secret police and a police state are the antithesis of what the criminologist David H. Bayley, one of the most respected scholars of comparative policing, calls “democratic policing,” which I refer to as just policing. As John Kleinig, another prominent scholar of policing, emphasizes, while officers in democratic societies are authorized “to detain and restrain,” this is meant to be “a constrained authority.” Clearly, the “unleashing” of the police, as reflected in the wearing of masks, should concern all Americans.
During an audience with Italian police officers in June of 2017, Pope Francis told them, “your vocation is service,” and he highlighted how their mission “is expressed in service to others” through their “constant availability, patience, a spirit of sacrifice and sense of duty.” I believe that law enforcement can be a noble profession, but I fear that in the United States it is not putting on its best face right now. Especially since it is trying to conceal it.
[From 2018: “An open letter to ICE from a former law enforcement officer.”]
