Police officers like me show our names, and feds in Portland should, too.

My name is Patrick Skinner, and I’m a former CIA operations officer. I love that I can say that now, but at one time I could not say that. Overseas my name sometimes wasn’t even my name; at home my name was my own, but my work was hidden. Either way, the cover story was always on my tongue. My work was clandestine and covert. Even my workplace, my employer, was secret. By definition and design, my work was not in public. There was nothing identifiable or attributable in my work. My authority came from presidential findings and national security laws, and my ability to do my job came in part from my neighbors not knowing who I was. My name is Patrick Skinner, and I’m a very worried American. I hate that I must say that, but I love that I can. For me, one of the best things about being an American is the freedom and even the obligation to speak out against injustice, and to speak up for those who aren’t being heard. By definition and design, my voice and your voice are public. Our authority comes from the Constitution, and our ability to do our job comes in whole from us knowing who our government is. AD AD There are many and major issues surrounding police work in America, all of which need serious discussion and commitment and action to address. I write now about only one, and I write with some urgency. That is the notion that law enforcement — local, state or federal — not just can but should engage with the public in anonymous fashion during times of emergency or crisis. This is happening now in Portland, Ore., with federal law enforcement and often happens with local police across the country during protests. Everything I have done, experienced and learned from all my roles shows me not only that this is the wrong path to address our challenges, but it is also the path that led us to this crisis in the first place. While the demonstrations and riots that arose after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis are national, even international, in spread, they remain intensely local. Each protest is, overwhelmingly, local citizens protesting and engaging nonviolently and, sometimes, violently with local police, as local governments try to balance constitutional rights with their obligations to maintain some semblance of public safety and order. These are exceedingly challenging times for all locals involved. The federal response to these local challenges is not just making matters worse, it’s also making the protesters’ point. That point is that law enforcement has become far too militarized in their equipment and mind-set and sometimes unaccountable and even anonymous in their operations and consequences. A persistent concern by so many communities is their belief — with justification — that their local police departments are relatively unaccountable for their mistakes, misdeeds and even crimes while they themselves are hammered by those police for their own mistakes, misdeeds and crimes. These issues are not new. What is new is the ubiquitous cellphone camera that is recording police interactions with their neighbors and broadcasting them to the world. The public has power in making public the actions of law enforcement. AD AD So it is no accident that the federal law enforcement officers sent to Portland were essentially anonymous to the locals and therefore unaccountable to the locals. Since 9/11, even the most anodyne of federal law enforcement agencies have bulked up their roles and their costumes in the theater of counterterrorism. The militarization of local police is finally getting the broad scrutiny it deserves, but the trend of equipping and training for asymmetric war against an ever-elastic list of “terrorists” is even worse under the sprawling umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies include the Federal Bureau of Prisons; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Customs and Borders Protection, all of which do important work, none of which should be countering protests and demonstrations on American streets. These federal agencies apparently believe the public identifying their officers, of knowing who they are, would present an unacceptable risk to those officers. The risk to the public and the very idea of accountability to the public evidently was dismissed. Protesters and city officials alike were not soothed by reassurances from federal officials that there were “unique identifiers” for the federal officers that only their agencies would know. Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, put out a statement defending his officers’ anonymity, saying on Twitter, “You will not see names on their uniforms b/c these same violent criminals use this information to target them & their families, putting both at risk. As Acting Commissioner, I will not let that happen!” The exquisite paradox — of protesters demonstrating against being treated as enemy combatants by their local police departments, only to be met with federal forces doing the same thing but with better equipment and zero local accountability — is wrongheaded and unjust all around. Law enforcement knows the power of a name, the power of identity, the power of accountability. It insists on all three of those things from the public in almost every interaction. Yet during a time where identity and accountability are needed most — at the time of most tension — law enforcement says it will provide neither. AD AD Using hyper-militarized federal law enforcement officers also fails to recognize an underappreciated truth: that all policing, like all politics, is essentially local. Labeling and denouncing local social unrest and protest as the work of outside agitators makes it easy to dismiss the concerns of the local crowd as foreign and inauthentic — and act with overwhelming force. Once federal officials lumped peaceful protesters in Portland together with violent rioters, calling them all terrorists and “violent anarchists,” the stage was set for scenes of camouflaged and anonymous federal officers shooting less-than-lethal projectiles and chemical dispersants at a “Wall of Moms” standing in a protest line. The warrior mind-set in policing makes enemy combatants of citizens — of moms. Unaccountability metastasizes under cover of anonymity, and it is a blight to policing in America. I say this as the police officer I am, living where I work in Savannah, Ga., and the covert CIA officer I was, working overseas. I understand the needs of both jobs and reject the notion that anonymity and secrecy — or the militarized environment in which they operate — play a role in public police work. There are of course reasons a specific police officer engaged in undercover work needs her or his identity shielded, but for police work done in public against the public, visibility and accountability are required. This applies to federal law enforcement as well, especially since in Portland it was those units that were in many ways the outside agitators. They were acting under vastly expanded interpretations of federal authority and responsibilities, over the pointed objections of local and state officials.