Retired police chief and Brown University professor Brandon del Pozo tore into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for wearing masks and concealing their identities during President Donald Trump's immigration raids — and claimed their reasoning for doing so is nonsense.
"Let's get right to the heart of this," said anchor Melissa Murray. "ICE says that the masks are absolutely necessary to protect the safety of their agents and to prevent doxing. But you argue that anonymous policing poses even greater threats to society. Can you elaborate?"
"Well, first of all, American police have been facing much greater dangers, equal or greater as ICE, for decades, since the beginning, in fact," said del Pozo. "Arresting rapists, arresting robbers, killers of all sorts. They've never thought to mask themselves, to protect themselves from retribution. I used to get calls from the state police when certain felons got out of prison saying ... just so you know, that man that threatened your life is now out of prison. I never for a second thought of hiding my face from the public, hiding my face from the people I policed. Nor did any cop that I knew and worked with. And we were proud that we had the courage to do our jobs that way."
The real risk, he added, is that "if people get confused by what's happening when masked men are coming out of nowhere and grabbing people off the street, that's a worse safety risk to ICE than doxing, which should be illegal and should be prosecuted, but is not the most important thing here in our democracy."
"Well, to that point in your piece for The Atlantic, you wrote that anonymous policing could, quote, 'expose federal agents, local police and the public to physical dangers that make the risks of doxing seem minor in comparison,'" Murray said. "And you note that masks are often a marker of criminals looking to intimidate their prey while avoiding identification. Are we actually seeing some of these dangers playing out right now? And are they putting law enforcement and ICE enforcement in danger?"
"Yeah," said del Pozo. "So there's been many tragic cases of misidentification between police officers in different agencies, even within the same agency on duty and off duty. There are already people wearing masks and impersonating ICE officers to commit felonies. When you have local police, other jurisdictions responding to masked men with guns, masked women with guns, masked folks, it sets up a recipe for disaster, right?"
Indeed, he added, "there are cops that have been killed by friendly fire from other cops in cases of misidentification, criminal impersonation ... that's happened throughout policing already, even without the masks."
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