Criminals and the Normalization of Masks
I was wondering about this:
Masks that have made criminals stand apart long before bandanna-wearing robbers knocked over stagecoaches in the Old West and ski-masked bandits held up banks now allow them to blend in like concerned accountants, nurses and store clerks trying to avoid a deadly virus.
“Criminals, they’re smart and this is a perfect opportunity for them to conceal themselves and blend right in,” said Richard Bell, police chief in the tiny Pennsylvania community of Frackville. He said he knows of seven recent armed robberies in the region where every suspect wore a mask.
[…]
Just how many criminals are taking advantage of the pandemic to commit crimes is impossible to estimate, but law enforcement officials have no doubt the numbers are climbing. Reports are starting to pop up across the United States and in other parts of the world of crimes pulled off in no small part because so many of us are now wearing masks.
In March, two men walked into Aqueduct Racetrack in New York wearing the same kind of surgical masks as many racing fans there and, at gunpoint, robbed three workers of a quarter-million dollars they were moving from gaming machines to a safe. Other robberies involving suspects wearing surgical masks have occurred in North Carolina, and Washington, D.C, and elsewhere in recent weeks.
The article is all anecdote and no real data. But this is probably a trend.
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Erwin8 • May 20, 2020 7:22 AM
… the larger point is that wearing-of-masks is NOT, in itself, a dangerous behavior.
Criminals also wear hats, sunglasses, and beards without criminal offense.
Politicians routinely criminalize non-criminal behaviors because it sometimes helps identify actual criminals — but that also lumps many innocent persons into an unjust, artificial category of “crime”.
In the U.S., politicians have no constitutional authority to criminalize mask-wearing (as many locales do) — but politicians are rarely constrained by such quaint notions.