California bans masks meant to hide law enforcement officers' identities | Hacker News Reader

California bans masks meant to hide law enforcement officers' identities

npr.org

135 points1659447091102 comments

I want to say this is good, but if you look at the "exemptions" for when law enforcement wearing masks is fine, it covers basically any and every possible scenario. So to me it just seems a performative act to make it seem like they are doing something while doing nothing at all.

Historically, establishing a right with exceptions then subsequently eliminating those exceptions has been effective method of effecting change in the US government system.

E.g. the famous Marbury v. Madison decision that effected no action in that instance but substantially shaped the relationship between the branches by establishing the federal court system's power of judicial review

> They didn't ban criminals from wearing masks, they didn't tell criminals that they had to identify themselves," Bianco said while campaigning in Northern California on Friday. "Every single person that voted for that needs to be eliminated in the next election. Anyone that votes for those people are absolute idiots.

I question the intelligence of suggesting that police should be held to the same standard as criminals. "If the bad guys can do it, we should be able to do it!" Is a wild take.

The core tenet that makes someone the good guy is "we treat them better than they would treat us". It's so disappointing to see the people who are supposed to be the good guys advocating they should be able to be as cruel as the bad guys they exist to prevent.

Am I missing something?

> Bianco said while campaigning in Northern California on Friday. "Every single person that voted for that needs to be eliminated in the next election. Anyone that votes for those people are absolute idiots.

holy shit, "eliminated" is not the appropriate word here... what is wrong with this guy? (other than uncontrolled anger?)

I'm starting to see this everywhere. "There was no due process when illegal immigrants hopped the border" and "Laken Riley didn't get any due process" are widespread talking points at this point. Kavanaugh talks about how the goal of the criminal is to evade the law when considering the balance of equities in his concurrence on racial profiling in ICE stops.

I've even seen comments here and on reddit of people saying that the exclusionary rule should be eliminated, since if somebody is a criminal they shouldn't get constitutional protections.

It is worth remembering that the idea that the constitution seriously protects even those who really did crimes is pretty radical. Things that we consider to be baked into our judicial system (the exclusionary rule, miranda warnings) are not terribly old and were extremely controversial when first established. Congress passed a whole law saying that Miranda v Arizona was invalid (which they don't have the power to do). This means that we need active work to protect it.

In addition to that, you don't need to ban criminals from wearing masks because you can already arrest them for the crime they're doing. And also pretty sure you can identify them after that one way or the other. It's a dumb take throughout.

Moral relativism leads people to narrative extremes to justify behavior.

The part you’re confused by is the ‘supposed to be the good guys’.

I don't see how this will be enforceable.

I do. ICE agents show up hiding their face, Local or State cops put them in handcuffs for breaking the law.

Federal agents then do same for state authorities for obstructing justice.

Hence why this will be decided by the Supreme Court, as it's fundamentally a question of state vs federal power and the limits of each.

Yeah, call me overly cynical but I'm waiting for this cycle to play out:

- CA bans face-masks for law-enforcement

- White House issues executive order requiring face-mask use for all federal law enforcement

- Both are placed on hold pending litigation, allowing the status quo (face-masks) to continue

- Litigation eventually winds up at the Supreme Court

- Supreme Court once again confirms White House can do whatever the hell it wants, Constitution be damned.

I really hate this timeline. Like, a lot.

The en vogue 'Supreme Court always sides with the Administration' is a lazy and inaccurate take. (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')

If people actually took the time to read the opinions [0], they'd realize...

1. Many of the 'allow the administration to continue' rulings are overriding stays, rather than actual decisions. Those cases are still pending in the courts and will eventually end up back at the Supreme Court.

2. Of the actual Supreme Court decisions, the news typically gives the most dumbed-down, hot take version.

3. Even to people without a legal background, much of the decision or dissent is written in plain English, attempts to lay out the rationale, and can be read by anyone with a secondary education.

[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/24

> (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')

Just FWIW, giving up wasn't my point at all. I'm just not particularly optimistic that putting anything in front of the current SCOTUS bench will result in a lot of welcome rulings. That doesn't mean we don't seek legal remedies; it just means we need to plan for them to not work out and act accordingly. I'm heartened by the amount of work people are putting in at the state level and getting appropriately creative with bending the rules — for instance, the recent effort to redefine corporate powers at the state level in order to obviate _Citizens United_.

I would hazard a guess of which group says "I'm not paid enough for this" first - with the billions of funding just given to ICE.

The FBI? Led by Kash “I put on Visine with a mop” Patel?

lol. Good luck with that

Do ICE agents have super powers or something?

Friend, it doesn't take superpowers. It just takes being on the same team.

Yeah, they're cops. Cops aren't going to arrest other cops. Their superpower is being the people who are supposed to enforce the law, if they decide to break it who is going to stop them?

Uncle Sam has the biggest military on Earth. State troopers wouldn’t last longer than the time to deploy.

Americans always talk about how they have the second amendment to stand up to tyrannical government.

Meanwhile tank man had a shopping bag.

While a powerful image in the west, tank man did not effect change.

The video is much cooler than the photo.

If "Uncle Sam" deploys the military, that's pretty much it for the USA.

They already have - the national guard.

The National Guard and Active Duty are very different, legally speaking.

https://www.csg.org/2024/09/25/military-101-orders/

What section of US law they're activated/deployed under determines whether or not they can legally be used in an internal law enforcement capacity.

And generally speaking, federalized forces (either active or NG) cannot ever be used as law enforcement.

Hence why, despite the posturing and marketing of 'sending the military in', this administration is specifically using federalized military forces only in non-law enforcement capacities (and then encouraging the freed up state/local law enforcement to focus on law enforcement).

That is enlightening, thank you.

The national guard was illegally deployed over a fake emergency, but AFAIK the troops themselves did not perform any additional constitutional violations.

I'm talking about the real military. The one explicitly prohibited in the constitution for be used for policing Americans.

Picking up trash in dc.

> Uncle Sam has the biggest military on Earth. State troopers wouldn’t last longer than the time to deploy

This is civil war. In a civil war there is no Uncle Sam. Just human beings from different states and of different political persuasions who need to decide what they do with their firepower, and whose orders they obey.

And how did that work out last time for the “misbehaving” states?

Currently only the widely unpopular executive branch of federal government is misbehaving.

Congress and the judiciary are misbehaving as well, otherwise either one could easily put a stop to the destructionists. In fact one might say the manic demented guy barking orders at the rest of the executive is just a deliberate attention-drawing point of a much wider conspiracy.

That's not true at all. Congress could remove Trump in a week if they weren't complicit. SCOTUS could put a stop to much of the stuff he's doing if they weren't complicit.

That military continually gets kicked out when its legal right to be there is called into question.

I don’t believe they’d leave with their own in jeopardy. However, we’re deep into uncharted territory here so hard to say definitively how it would all go down.

I'd say it's high time for state governors to start deploying their National Guards to keep order. The federal gangs are deliberately stirring up chaos to create new pretexts for the assertion of federal control. In addition to the obvious problem of the masked kidnap gangs undermining public trust and order, there have been many reports of groups of vehicles with federal plates forming moving blockades on highways, assaulting motorists, etc - seemingly whatever they can do to try and create confrontational situations. A straightforward guess is that these aren't even yesterday's officers with a nominal desire to uphold the law and go home at the end of the day, but rather loser militia types that have been quickly deputized to go into "blue states" and create problems for their perceived enemies.

Deploying Guards would also be a good way to start building some institutional momentum for defending our country - preempting following illegal orders (like what happened in CA), sussing out traitors in the chain of command, and mitigating the dynamic where much of traditional state law enforcement is sympathetic to the destructionists.

No, but federal law trumps state

There is no federal law here.

How would they possibly enforce this?

Don't Feds have immunity to almost everything?

But doesn't claiming that immunity require them to identify themselves as such? In which case identification to claim immunity to the law also happens to involve complying with the law.

California has a long track record of passing laws that don’t really do anything.

If by that, you mean that the law won't be obeyed by Trump's little secret police force, you're probably right.

I think the law is to start a fight with the Federal government. All they need to do is arrest 1 of them and then it's on.

Will it do anything? I dunno, but I'm tired of watching Dems do nothing.

No, I don’t mean laws like that.

I mean laws like that label near everything as cancer causing.

I'm surprised this needed to be a law. Or wasn't already one?

Or maybe I'm just surprised that a group of law enforcement officers would decide, "Hey, we don't want people to know who we are," and decide to wear masks.

"…I think this is what the state of California is trying to do. Establish limits as to how much the federal government can do within the jurisdiction of the state. It's an issue of state sovereignty."

More of the Cold Civil War playing out. (Also see coastal states forming health cooperatives (?) so that their citizens can get COVID vaccines, etc.)

> Or maybe I'm just surprised that a group of law enforcement officers would decide, "Hey, we don't want people to know who we are," and decide to wear masks.

It would be nice to be surprised. It _should_ be surprising. It's unfortunately not surprising at all.

Youth services has been hiding the names of their employees for more than a decade now. A few years back the final shoe dropped: now kids aren't even allowed to know the name of the judge that took them away from their home anymore.

They cite, of course, the same argument ICE makes: threats against them.

Is that legal? Well, their theory is that any kind of "family law" proceeding (including convicting minors of crimes, and locking them up without access to family or schooling for years) is considered civil law. Therefore none of the normal legal rights apply. I would think this is trivially a violation of the constitution, especially because it comes to imprisonment, but clearly it is not, since the justice department has no problems doing it. A child can be locked up for a crime (up to when they get 27 years old, yes, not 18, in some states), even if the present proof they didn't do it. The very, very, very basic legal right to not get convicted of a crime that you didn't do is openly violated by youth services. Right to have a trial? Nope. Right to having the state prove their case? Nope. Right to not get locked up without cause? No. Etc.

Needless to say, this was promptly exploited by some states who gave kickbacks to judges who "delivered" juveniles for private detention facilities. When caught doing this, the justice department promptly declared nobody had done anything wrong (except one of the judges who, in addition to having thousands of kids locked up for money, had lied on his taxes. He was never actually imprisoned, and finally pardoned by the president)

Oh and in case you don't know: locking minors away from school? Yes. Youth services does that. Parents aren't allowed to do that. Schools aren't allowed to do that. The police isn't allowed to do that (minor gets arrested, and wants to go to classes or do your homework? Police has to make it happen). Fucking death row isn't allowed to keep a minor out of school. But youth services IS allowed to do it.

So a secret police in the US? This is not new. What's new is that immigration enforcement started doing it on a large scale.

The US has used civil law to remove all kinds of rights. A person can make a plea deal (civil/contract law) that supersedes the government having to observe that persons constitutional rights and can erase all of their constitutional rights.

The government shouldn't be able to threaten you with 50 years in prison if you don't give up your rights. And they definitely shouldn't be able to tell a just that the agreement/plea wasn't coerced. But here we are.

>I'm surprised this needed to be a law. Or wasn't already one?

SWAT officers also wear masks when on mission, for their own protection, so why should ICE have to unmask by law?

I think you have it backwards: this applies to SWAT and is very unlikely to be respected by ICE.

Not any more.

It might also work to require visible badge numbers, but then cops in a situation just put tape over them, without consequences.

They're just going say that they're federal and not bound by state law, aren't law enforcement they're immigration enforcement, or that they're undercover.

In theory, the actual individuals are still bound by state law, but the supremacy clause allows federal laws made in pursuance of the US Constitution to preempt those state laws. Of course, these laws still need to be "necessary and proper" for carrying out an express power like regulating immigration. A law that is unnecessary or improper would theoretically not hold up in court. The same goes for executive action.

Perhaps the most infamous case of this was the Idaho manslaughter case against FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi for killing Vicki Weaver in the Ruby Ridge incident. His case was simply "removed" to federal court and dismissed under the supremacy clause (although this dismissal was later overturned narrowly when appealed).

What ever happened to "States Rights!"?

Lincoln ended most of those.

the real rub comes when someone tries to restrict the movements of federal "agents" into or within the state.

The right to restrict those movements has already been upheld in court multiple times

i have a gut feeling that adverse court dispositions mean very little to the federal government anymore.

> They're just going say that they're federal and not bound by state law

Sure. But hopefully they'll be saying that while one of their own is being charged.

Federal agents are 100% bound by State laws. Unless there is a Federal law that overturns the state law, Federal agents absolutely have to obey.

Under previous administrations? Not entirely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/map/LiabilityofaFederalOfficerun...

Under the current administration? Not at all https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/18/ice-nyc-protest-005...

I don't think the administration will care if their acctions break state law when they already blatantly ignore the supreme cours and the constitution every day. I'm think they should be stopped, but i don't think this will be effective, we need to reflect deeply on why this is happening to create a coherent sound plan as how to stop and prevent it.

Why do you need their identity though? What are you planning?

> Why do you need their identity though? What are you planning?

To hold them accountable when they break the law.

Why do you want their identities hidden? What are you planning or hoping they're planning?

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