Just noticed this image in the coverage of the recent shooting in the UK:
Its a pretty ubiquitous image (obviously more common in the US ) but regardless of the reason they are called out it seems very common for armed police anywhere in the world to have ski masks. Why? What advantage is there to a civilian police officer in wearing a ski mask, I mean cops generally wear high visibility clothing not camoflague.
Is this just a hang over from the military which does (or did) a lot of the training (and lets face most cops fantasize about) where camouflaging your face makes sense? Or just cos cops like running around with guns looking bad ass in a ski mask?
Agreed. I also think police uniforms should not be black. Only half-kidding when I suggest teal, salmon, aqua, peach, something that will not appeal to bullies and macho jerks.
Note that officers pictured are in tactical gear - what’s commonly called a SWAT team here in the U.S. The whole idea is very much to be intimidating. Whether that’s actually effective is another matter, and not something I know enough about to comment on.
It’s also possible they are on a counter-terrorist squad, and might have legitimate concerns about personal security if they’re publicly identified.
They’re not camouflaged, and this isn’t a military thing. Military personnel sometimes wear face masks for the same sort of intimidation purposes, and I suppose they might wear a camouflaged mask for actual camouflage purposes. But the kind of mask pictured isn’t very effective for camouflage.
Black is actually a bad choice for camouflage - you’re almost always darker than your background, and you stand out as a human-shaped silhouette, which is Bad. The type of mask with the broad eye slit breaks up your facial features a bit, but the other type, with the two eye holes and the mouth hole, is still easily identifiable as a face. Actual facial camouflage is intended to break up facial patterns we’re all hard-wired to pick out of background noise.
Plus, yeah, some of it is probably just that it looks bad ass.
Technically it’s not a “ski mask”. It’s called a tactical balaclava. They are worn for face protection and probably a bit of concealment. Usually along with a helmet, body armor and other tactical gear.
That is the UK so the officers pictured are part of a special firearms unit (equivalent to SWAT here in the USA). Regular police in the UK aren’t armed AFAIK and wear silly hats usually.
The reason SWAT teams and armed response units look very “military” is because they are typically called in when there is a high probability of actual shooting. Hostage situations, dangerous arrests, active shooter situations and whatnot. Personally, if I know I might get into a gun fight, I might want to bring as much military gear and vehicles as I can.
For normal policing though, no, I don’t think police should be walking around in tactical gear driving armored cars. Here in the USA, a lot of municipalities received a lot of old surplus military stuff. So now you have a lot of towns in Bumblefuck, Wherever that haven’t seen a shooting in ten years with armored trucks that look more in place in Afghanistan.
When this situation kicked off, it would have been treated as a potential terrorist event and the armed police pictured would have been prepared to deal with anything from Al Qaeda to IRA.
Once the situation was under control they would have sloped off and the normal, unarmed local police would have taken over.
The Federales in Mexico wear them because they don’t want the cartels targeting them and their families, so the motivation for wearing them cannot automatically be assumed to be a malevolent one.
Some of the masked officers might not normally be assigned to tasks performed by uniformed officers. Example: someone working undercover on a drug task force gets pulled in an emergency to assist with a school shooting. They wear a mask to protect their cover identity. I have also seen (rarely) a drug task force officer in plain clothes with a mask and a visible badge be present when officers are questioning a detained juvenile. They aren’t trying to intimidate the juvenile, but they protect their cover identity while asking questions about the adult drug dealers who are the real target of their investigation.
This is the point. Mass shootings are vanishingly rare in the UK (the last one was 2010), and non-firearm mass killings tend to be terrorist related (see more recent events on London and Manchester), so the first response is going to be anti-terrorist.
Some people are demanding to know the identity of the officer who shot the rioter in the Capitol on Jan.6 - I can’t imagine why the officer’s name is relevant, other than to provide an opportunity to harass them and their family. So - anonymity is important especially in the time of the internet.
Which is fine (the UK is definitely not as crazy as the US when it comes to giving cops military hardware for no reason). The guns, body armor, helmet, etc. all make sense if you expect someone to be shooting at you. The mask doesn’t though. There is zero advantage in a gun fight to wearing a ski mask.
Part of it is to conceal their identity (i.e from terrorists, organized criminals, other extremists). The flip side it also conceals their identity from the public and media.)
As for protection, it’s my understanding balaclavas also provide protection against stuff like fire, chemicals, flying glass and debris and so on.
) but regardless of the reason they are called out it seems very common for armed police anywhere in the world to have ski masks. Why? What advantage is there to a civilian police officer in wearing a ski mask, I mean cops generally wear high visibility clothing not camoflague.