After a high profile case of a MET officer kidnapping and murdering a woman through the use of his status, the MET has decided that all plain clothes officers will work in tandem. So you should never be stopped by a lone plain clothes officer.
An officer uniform should be easy to identify exactly to prevent confusion in cases like somebody being arrested in the middle of the street.
>There should be no plainclothes officers on duty.
might be "there should be no plainclothes officers with regular police arrest powers"? I agree that there are certainly cases where it's valuable to have officers working undercover. I also think there is a strong argument though that while they are in plain clothes, they should also have more restricted "plain clothes powers" more like a regular civilian. They shouldn't be able to arrest anyone or demand special recognition as police, or at least to no greater extent then what any random citizen can do in a Citizen's Arrest [0]. That could tamper a certain amount of abuse and room for mixups while still preserving the valuable investigative and monitoring aspects. Basically if they want to surrender some of the typical recognition and accountability they must also surrender some of the power that goes with it, so it's more self-regulating. Feels like a parallel with other areas of force like military, where in general legitimate combatants justified in full protection of the laws of war also must have identifiable uniforms and so on.
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0: Rules vary by state and country. In the US at least in general (though not all states) citizens may do arrests, but there are much stricter requirements. They need to directly witness the crime, they do not have qualified immunity and aren't entitled to the same mistakes of fact when it comes to personal liability, and are much more limited in use of force.
I don’t think there is much to gain here.
The law says, IIRC that plainclothes officers must show their ID, without even being asked for it, when approaching people.
So it’s not like they are secret spooks.