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Won’t this make it easier for the looters to target and destroy them?
It's not preventing cops from disguising themselves as civilians. It's preventing uniformed cops from covering up their name and badge to try to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
Police are already required to show their badge numbers.

However many police in many jurisdictions have taken to obscuring and covering their badge numbers, so you can't file a complaint.

In NYPD officers were(are?) "commemorating the officers who have fallen to coronavirus". Their commemoration? a single strip of black tape over their badge number.

In DC and elsewhere there are unmarked, non-standard officers, that are not saying even which government department they represent.

This is specifically to ensure that there is no accountability.

While I support this legislation, aren’t officers already required to provide their name and badge number? Why is covering it even allowed?
it isn't and yet they do it with impunity. Honestly I think deliberately covering your badge should be an immediate dismissal and loss of perks and pension.

The other problem though is that those rules only apply to the police, not the national guard, and definitely not the people trump bought in to DC that would not even identify the agency they're from.

We only know that they a probably a Texas prison riot suppression group due to research by journalists. So yeah, a prison riot group from out of state - specifically a conservative state - got brought in unannounced to DC to suppress protests, with out being identified in any way, or providing any kind of id.

As a veteran of many AIDS protests in NYC in the early 80s I can attest cops routinely cover their badge numbers, and have been doing so for years. I have a bunch of old (35mm) photos to prove it.
This is just plain dumb. Undercover work is crucial to law enforcement.

edit: I would delete this, as as others have pointed out, the headline doesn't match the article. But apparently that's not allowed by HN once replied to.

undercover work "in uniform responding to First Amendment assemblies"?
Don't expect a Hacker News 10xer who's busy changing the world to read the article before he comments on it.
It's true that I often judge articles by their often defective headlines. I'll delete.
I mean the police have routinely planted undercover officers in protests.

There are plenty of people who have claimed said some of the plainclothes cops were doing the actual inciting, though obviously such reports are unsubstantiated - the reporters and the police both have ample reason to lie here.

I'm inclined to believe the ones not shooting at the other ones myself.
The only evidence of shooting we have is protesters being shot by police. That's it.
> ... legislation to require that federal officers in uniform responding to First Amendment assemblies have their agency and name visibly marked.