Stockton Vice Mayor Jason Lee said he will be pushing ahead with recommendations on how the city can enact a face-covering ban to deter crime.
“For the last several months, I’ve been talking about a face-covering ban because we’ve been seeing more and more people robbed at gunpoint, daytime, nighttime, (by) people with ski masks,” Lee said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
He held up sketches from the Stockton Police Department of a pair of suspects in the city’s latest high-profile robbery.
“We are a community right now where an eighth-grader was robbed at his graduation of a money lei in broad daylight by people with ski masks on,” Lee said.
Both of the perpetrators, who were armed at the time of the robbery, were wearing face coverings pulled up to their noses, according to witnesses’ descriptions.
Lee added that there’s no need for face coverings for most people in Stockton.
“There’s no snow here,” he said. “COVID is not what it was years ago.”
Several jurisdictions around the country have enacted face-mask bans or are contemplating them, even though such ordinances raise concerns about First Amendment rights.
Like many states, California already has a law making it a misdemeanor to wear “any mask, false whiskers or any personal disguise” with the intent to conceal one’s identity to commit a crime. It was enacted in 1872, the Wild West days of stage coach robberies and bank holdups.
But some jurisdictions are going further. Nassau County, New York, enacted a “Mask Transparency Ban” that forbids wearing a face covering except for religious, celebratory or health reasons. It came after lawmakers there determined wearing masks otherwise can “be used as a predicate to harassing, menacing or criminal behavior.”
NBC New York reported that police there made their first arrest last August, an 18-year-old who was also carrying a knife.
After the protests over war in Gaza that roiled colleges across the nation last year, the University of California included a ban on face masks to conceal identities along with a prohibition on encampments last August. The policy applies to all campuses.
But some are worried such policies violate human rights.
The American Civil Liberties Union warns that mask laws can infringe on the rights of people engaged in peaceful protests. It says allowing people to wear masks becomes all the more defensible in the digital age of facial-recognition systems.
“The push to normalize face recognition by security agencies threatens to turn our faces into the functional equivalent of license plates. Anti-mask laws are in effect a requirement to display those ‘plates’ anytime one is in public,” wrote Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst on the organization’s website last summer.
“Humans,” Stanley said, “are not cars.”