The militarized federal response to protests in Portland has been grotesquely inappropriate and reprehensible, but critiques of the fact that federal agents are wearing camouflage uniforms seem to miss the forest for the trees. A spokesman for Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that, “We want a system where people can tell the difference [between police and military personnel],” while Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told the Washington Post that, “They need to stop this charade and stop pretending they’re the military. They need to put their ICE uniforms and CBP uniforms back on.”
Of course those performing what is supposed to be police work should not be wearing camouflage. But the public’s central concern should be that law enforcement is acting like soldiers, not that they look like soldiers. Photos of federal agents and Portland police confronting demonstrators instantly point up the limits to this argumentation; apart from the color of their uniforms, the feds appear all but indistinguishable from the police, bulked up by helmets and body armor, and bristling with weaponry. The weaponry, and the willingness to injure people they do not recognize as citizens exercising constitutional rights to protest, is the true violation of their purported law enforcement role.
I can understand someone making an argument that military uniforms encourage CBP and other Department of Homeland Security-associated federal agents to think of themselves as soldiers, but against their weaponry and clear mission from higher-ups to suppress the Portland demonstrations with shows of force, this argument becomes academic. For those genuinely interested in establishing and maintaining a clear line between police and military powers, a stronger case can be made that by dressing in camouflage, these purported police are honestly showing what they really are: a paramilitary force serving the political needs of a lawless president, glad to embrace military uniforms as part of their mission to intimidate and terrorize demonstrators. Any insistence that they change their uniforms that doesn’t also question their weaponry, tactics, and mission ends up providing rhetorical cover fire for their malign activities.
The reasons for pushback specifically on the question of uniforms appears to have more to do with institutional fears from both police departments and the US military that their reputations will be sullied by confusion spawned by CBP types. As the Post notes, “the uniforms [. . . ] can chip away at the image of the military, which enjoys the highest level of trust of any public institution.” I suppose it is important that the military preserve its public trust, but as a national concern, this pales in comparison to Americans not being subject to the violence of federal agents, whatever their uniform or agency. Likewise, if police are interested in not being thought of as a militarized presence, the best way to do that would be to lose their own body armor and extravagant weaponry, which many argue end up escalating conflicts with the civilians they’re sworn to protect. It should be obvious that acting like soldiers even while wearing police uniforms discredits public faith in the police, and rightly so.