Police and face coverings

[stinkwheel]

It was just something I was pondering that might be a topic for discussion. The more potentially dodgy a thing the police seem to be doing, the more likely they seem to be to cover their face. Taken to an extreme in the US at the moment with their ICE agents but you see a lot of it in the UK these days too. I can think of several reasons why they WOULD want their face covered but so people can't see who they are generally isn't one of them.

Legitimate reasons I can think of:
1) Cold face: So the temperature should be below a certain limit before you're allowed to.

2) Safety from flying objects/noxious substances: Fine, if that's a risk, you should be wearing gear rated to cover that specific risk. Which is never a balaclava or buff and would presumably also include CE approved eye protection too.

3) Operational Security: I can see there would be a very small number of circumstances where an undercover officer would need to conceal their identity. So it should be using a piece of issued uniform and it's use should be only on the specific written permission of the chief constable having made a case for why it's needed.

Policing shouldn't on the whole be secretive. Especially not when uniformed and in the public eye. If as a uniformed policeman you are doing something you don't want people to see you doing. Should you be doing it?
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“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[Kawasaki Jimbo]

Yes, I saw the video of the two women disrespecting and then driving away from an ICE agent who didn’t seem to be in danger but shot to kill anyway, and I wondered why a person could murder another with so little provocation.

There’s no simple answer but I wonder whether a militarised, individually-anonymised police force feels they’ve got nowhere else to go in that situation. They can’t just do nothing and allow the agency to be neutered. Meanwhile they feel they have no individual responsibility in the moment, they are simply an arm of the agency. It does seem like an irrational leap but in that situation with the resources they have, they may feel firearms are the inevitable resort. Anarchic behaviour invites an authoritarian response.

[Val]

[sickpup]