Early Halloween: Scary Like ICE

Hey, kids: Need a quick costume for Halloween?  How about dressing up in an ICE outfit?  You’ve got the mask, so no one can see who you are – and you can scare people, too. In fact, a federal judge has said that “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”

U.S. District Judge William Powell (appointed to the federal bench in 1985 by Ronald Reagan), ruling from his bench in Massachusetts, acknowledged that administration officials offered other justifications for masking.  The judge didn’t buy them: “This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by [the ICE officers seized the Tufts graduate student, Rumesya Ozturk] for masking up and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable. . . . It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor — and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.”

Of course, masks are associated with bank robbers and racists in sheets.  But people who aren’t desperados or Klansmen have masked for a variety other reasons.  Beyond Halloween, think of ancient Greek and traditional Japanese drama, of the wooden masks Tlingits have used to tell stories and perform rituals.  (The Encyclopedia Britannica says they’ve been worn all over the world since the Stone Age.)

Then, of course, people wear masks to protect themselves from Hockey pucks, baseballs, toxic fumes.  Or from contracting or spreading, say COVID.  That one turned out to be pretty controversial. It seems that real Americans don’t wear COVID masks.  And until this year, when lung problems and cancers among young wildland firefighters made national headlines, the U.S. Forest Service believed that real firefighters didn’t mask up against wildfire smoke, either.

You can hide your identity without wearing a mask – or at least you could before 2007, when the first iPhones hit the market with built-in cameras.  Have people done it? You bet.  And why not?  No ID, no way to know who’s out there committing crimes.

It happened here during the anti-WTO demonstrations of late 1999.  Cops on the street wore rain gear or riot gear over their uniforms. Any badges or name tags were hidden by those outer layers.   As a result, no one knew who had pepper-sprayed seated protesters at close range or tear-gassed random pedestrians or hit bystanders with billy clubs or roughed up and arrested people who were guilty of nothing but wearing anti-WTO pins.  Asked to identify themselves, some of those cops refused.  Some clearly targeted people with cameras.  Some reportedly pulled on ski masks.  No one even knew if they were really Seattle cops. the city of Seattle was responsible for all of them, but some came from other jurisdictions.

The Seattle City Council didn’t do a whole lot in the wake of the city’s WTO fiasco, but within a year, it did pass an ordinance that required uniformed officers to wear ID on their outer layers of clothing.

(Of course, those cops on the street weren’t responsible for the city’s crappy planning, much less their inadequate training, all-but-nonexistent supervision, lack of food or bathroom breaks, or their inadequate numbers. Or the city’s sheer unwillingness to prepare for the obvious: Some protest groups had announced well in advance that they would shut Seattle down.  And everybody knew that self-styled anarchists from Oregon, who were into breaking stuff, were in Seattle; they were in fact staying at a known location.  They were the people who subsequently broke downtown store windows while a TV camera crew walked with them.)

WTO week wasn’t the first time Seattle cops hid IDs in order to commit crimes.  In 1970, when people protesting the conviction of the so-called “Chicago 7” demonstrated in front of Seattle’s federal courthouse, the state ACLU’s executive director, Michael Rosen, reported that he had seen a cop run into a young woman who was simply standing on the sidewalk, knocking her to the ground.  After she was standing again, another cop swung a wooden club at her – like, Rosen said, someone teeing off on a golf course – and smashed it into her skull.  He ran out into the street to see if he could help her and get the club-swinging cop’s name or badge number.  He failed on both counts.  He couldn’t reach the injured women because there were too many cops in the way.  And he couldn’t get a name or badge number because none of the cops he saw wore visible ID.

This isn’t to say – and he didn’t suggest — that all the cops he saw there or all those on Seattle’s streets during the WTO protests were bad guys.  But their anonymity gave the bad guys among them license to do as they pleased.  And it encouraged people to assume that one cop was as bad as another.  It’s much the same with ICE.  If you look like a bad guy and act – or keep company with people who act — like a bad guy, some people might get a certain . . . impression, you know?  The kind of impression the Trump administration wants you to have.

Is that the impression most Americans want? Recent polls suggest that it’s not.  Yes, Trump was elected President less than a year ago.  But no, most Americans (53 percent) disapprove of the ICE raids. And in our notorious blue Seattle-area bubble?  Way less than that.  If Kristi Noem’s masked marauders showed up here, probably even the local crows would mob them.  So on second thought, that ICE costume wouldn’t be a great idea. Wear something else. If you want anyone to give you treats.