Yes, it’s always better than they can harass, teargas and even shoot peaceful protesters, be they BLM, “liberal”, whatnot, and terrorize innocent civilians, conduct armed no-knock raids on the wrong house, all in the name of “security”, with impunity and perfect anonymity.
If they don’t like the risks that come with the job, they don’t have to do it.
Was the name of the officer who killed George Floyd relevant?
Was the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown relevant?
Moderator Note
This is GQ, so let’s focus on the facts, please. The political and social aspects of this are better suited to other forums.
Not so: The first response will be a couple of unfortunate PCs in a Panda car whose only weapons will be an extendable baton.
They will have started to move bystanders away while more resources (still unarmed) arrive. The main focus will still be on keeping the curious away and trying to give first aid to any casualties if they can get near them.
The guys in the masks will be the last to arrive, often behind the ambulances and it’s their job to arrest the gunman.
You make it sound like they saunter into action once all the bodies have been cleared - in the Borough Market attack they killed all 3 terrorists within 8 minutes of the first emergency call.
Borough Market is in Central London which is regularly patrolled by armed officers. A Plymouth suburb is a far cry from that and although like all police everywhere, they will have a procedure in place, it will have taken several minutes to get things moving.
They certainly wouldn’t have sauntered, but neither would they have been sitting in a patrol car, fully armed and ready to roll.
When police raid a location with arrest warrants I imagine they are often accompanied by undercover officers who know the layout and can identify the targets. The only way to draw attention away from that officer is for all the officers to cover their faces.
This is not far from the Navy Yard, which is an obvious terrorism target.
The main purpose of a tactical face covering is to reduce visibility of shiny or lighter skin, and also to protect skin from things like abrasions and hot shell casings.
The secondary purpose in policing is to hide the identity of the police to protect them from reprisals, since they do violent stuff that often isn’t appreciated by the general public.
It also bears observing that police forces have been drifting in a more militarized direction for some time now. I can tell you what a military armored personnel carrier is for, but that doesn’t adequately explain why every backwater police department in the US now seems to have one. I would put tacti-cool facial coverings in that same category.
It’s because of the military’s “1033 Program” to dispose of obsolete military equipment - from office furniture to grenade launchers and Humvees.
https://www.dla.mil/DispositionServices/Offers/Reutilization/LawEnforcement/ProgramFAQs.aspx
Yeah it’s a side track to the OP but I’d put money on the fact that the cops pictured in OP were NOT from Plymouth (a town of 262k people) and they are definitely not from the suburb the shooting happened. They probably arrived from Bristol or some some other big city.
The phenomenon of small town police forces equipped like they are going to have to storm a major city and take it in street by street fighting is a US thing.
In terms of identifying officers the mask is probably not important. Their identity badge with a number on it is going to provide much clearer and unambiguous ID in the case of bad behaviour.
The officers attending the UK shooting will all have regular assignments that do not involve these sorts of responses. In the UK this is the worst incident in 10 years. It isn’t common, unlike say the US. Keeping their identity secret is likely critical to their ordinary jobs. The public interest is not going to be served by making their identities public. It would be more sense to mandate masks to avoid an officer suddenly becoming unable to work their normal assignments after being publicly identified. Losing highly trained officers from ordinary duties like this would place a significant burden on the police for zero benefit.
Which is why it typically is not displayed.
The Devon and Cornwall police website does not specify where they base their armed response units, but it would be reasonable to assume that they came from Crownhill police station in Plymouth with reinforcements from police HQ in Middlemoor, Exeter.
They would be able to call on assistance from MOD Plymouth if they needed it. Bristol is three hours away by road and a different County.
Right, that’s how they have it, but it doesn’t come close to explaining why they have it.
(Taking a wild non-factual stab, they have it because it’s available, and they want to be more military/tactical even though the need for that is limited and highly debatable).
Coming back round to the point about why police cover their face like that, it’s more about the role of police evolving away from Officer Friendly and more toward Rambo with no real underlying reason other than they have the stuff, they like the aesthetic, and they’ve shifted their perception of duty from protecting the community to protecting themselves.
I think part of it is a “coolness” factor. But I also think there is a real sense that on some level they might need it for something like a mass shooting, terrorist attack, civil unrest, heavily armed criminals, etc. Mass shootings happen everywhere. The North Hollywood shootout in 1997 showed how ineffectual even the LAPD was against two heavily armed suspects in the sort of body armor anyone can buy online now.
IIRC some jurisdictions have made possession of body armor by private citizens illegal - and bulletproofing automobiles. The logic is that sort of protection is only used by and for gangs.
Another factor why the British police SWAT teams would use face masks would be because in their history with the IRA, it was expected that the police members in these elite squads could themselves be targeted outside of work. It never hurts to be anonymous in that situation.
Another reason would be because police target protesters outside of protests. Police naturally judge other people against themselves, and expect the same kind of behavior from other people as they engage in themselves.
It’s face protection. It’s like a flame retardant, abrasion resistant glove for the face. The real question is why aren’t they wearing their eye-pro?
This is a practice that long predates social media though. The image of masked men (the police) breaking into your house at 5 AM to serve a warrant was an image used by the likes of conservative radio hosts like G. Gordon Liddy back in the 1990s.