Although we are five years out of the Covid pandemic’s most desperate hours, debates about masking have clung to their fiery place in the culture wars. The context has shifted — from public health emergency to campus protests over Gaza to immigration raids on Home Depot parking lots. But the various arguments, deeply politicized, remain entrenched in a single question: Whose personal liberties ought to be sacrosanct?
In the past few weeks there has been an expansion into new territory, perhaps the most contentious of which pits the rights of law enforcement against anyone immigration agents and police officers deems suspicious. Less than a year after signing into law the Mask Transparency Act, a statute more or less banning face coverings in the western half of Long Island, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Nassau County executive, amended it via an executive order, creating an exception that allows police officers to wear masks on duty.
This was necessary, he maintained, to ensure the safety of those executing the raids, as well as officers’ family members, who might be sought out and threatened. He signed the order the same day that the Department of Homeland Security issued a news release asserting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., had been subject to a surge of assaults after their personal information was publicized.
Objectors to Mr. Blakeman’s move pointed to an inherent contradiction. By allowing police officers to wear masks on the job, the law gives them the freedom to conceal their identities while they are rounding up immigrants who (at least on parts of Long Island) are prohibited from wearing them. It permits officers, as Beth Haroules, a staff lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, put it, to act as both “sword and shield.”
The N.Y.C.L.U. is already suing Nassau County over the warm relationship it has maintained with the Trump administration in regard to immigrant detention. The explicit partnership, lawyers argue, undermines Fourth Amendment protections regarding searches, seizures and privacy. The mask exemption has only amplified these concerns, given that it brings local police closer in appearance and style to ICE agents, who are now arresting 500 percent more noncriminal immigrants than they were eight years ago.
And to what end, all this ominous camouflage? For years, local governments have been striving to strengthen the relationship between the police and the constituents they are meant to safeguard, to refashion law enforcement as less intimidating, not more. “People are concerned about community policing and the relationships we’ve built with our officers,” Seth Koslow, a county legislator and Democrat who is running to replace Mr. Blakeman, told me. “Nassau County police officers are fantastic, and the ICE agents are coming in and eroding that trust. We’ve worked very hard to get here. And now we’re going backward.”
It can be difficult to keep track of all the legislation floating around this issue and whatever it was that prompted it. The Mask Transparency Act originated as a response to anti-Israel protests (even if suburban Long Island was not an epicenter of campus radicalism), and the demonstrators’ penchant for covering their faces, in many cases to avoid doxxing at a moment when employers are revoking job offers to pro-Palestinian graduates.
When the law took effect in August, wearing a mask in public (with exceptions for certain health or religious reasons) was punishable by a $1,000 fine or a year in prison. Mr. Blakeman said he also saw it as a “broad public safety measure,” one that could deter crimes more generally. He mentioned bank robberies, for example, which F.B.I. data tell us have dropped by 85 percent over the past 30 years due almost entirely to digitized money transfers.
Apart from perceptions of political opportunism, apart from the view that these bans violate free expression, the reality is that they are often arbitrarily or selectively applied. In testimony last year opposing the Nassau County law, the N.Y.C.L.U.’s executive director, Donna Lieberman, pointed to a 2023 report by a Latino legal advocacy group documenting that the Nassau County Police Department had disproportionately tagged people of color with no criminal history as gang members based on what they were wearing and how they looked. There was no reason, she concluded, to think that a mask ban would be enforced differently.
And there was also no reason to believe that the police and prosecutors and the judicial system would be able to adequately and consistently establish the intent of someone wearing a mask. Was it to prevent skin chafing on a cold day? Or was it to hide from the facial recognition software installed at the entrance to the apartment building you were on your way to burglarize? Of the 21 mask-related arrests made since the ban’s implementation in August, nine have resulted in convictions.
As ever, history has the receipts. When then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo instituted mandatory masking in the spring of 2020 to slow the furious spread of the coronavirus, an 1845 law criminalizing mask wearing first had to be stricken from the books. That law was passed in response to the 1839 anti-rent movement, which took hold in upstate New York among tenant farmers who costumed themselves in sheepskin and horns and put bags over their heads to burn eviction notices and unsettle usurious landlords whom they occasionally tarred and feathered.
Mask wearing in the service of “entertainment” was exempt, but what defined “entertainment” turned out to be mutable. When the Vanderbilts threw a masquerade ball at their Fifth Avenue mansion in 1883, the police left the arriving and departing masked guests alone. The turn-of-the-century cross-dressers and drag queens populating Greenwich Village and the Brooklyn waterfront, however, were not left alone. In the years ahead, the law was used against protesters of the Vietnam War and the Shah of Iran, and those who took part in Occupy Wall Street.
Six years ago, before Covid, we were given a fitting cultural referent through which to think about the implications of masking: the HBO series “Watchmen,” a sci-fi exploration of race and vigilantism based on a graphic novel set in an alternate American history. In order to battle a group of mask-wearing white supremacists based in Oklahoma, a law is passed to allow the police force of Tulsa to wear masks themselves. Predictably, the line separating the good guys from the bad guys is hopelessly blurred.
I recently asked the show’s creator, Damon Lindelof, about the series’ prescience. “The calculus of the show was that we should be really scared of people who wear masks,” he told me. “If you’re an ICE officer and doing your job and finding individuals who are not in the country legally, then why are you hiding your face?” he said. “Brett Kavanaugh does not wear a mask.”
“I believe in justice, in criminals facing consequences, but that’s been true since I have been alive, and police did not have to wear masks,” Mr. Lindelof said. So, where, he asked, “will it stop?”