this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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I would like to point out that many different law enforcement agencies, of many kinds, in the US, use plainclothes officers.
ICE, FBI, ATF, DEA, etc etc... Pick any agency you want, or a local police department, or a large urban metro one, or a county one, or the state patrol, or the US Marshalls... probably literally all of them historically have used plainclothes agents at one point or another, used them for surveillance and HUMINT, even used them for arrests, sometimes with fairly heavy armanents and in large numbers, planted informants in organizations, etc.
While the meme here is clumsy by way of just contrasting 'plainclothes' vs 'secret police'... plainclothes agents are essentially a tactic, which certainly often is used by 'secret police', agencies that meet your definition.
I get the line you are drawing, and it is a useful one, but unfortunately the situation is not that simple.
Fuck, a plainclothes 'secret shopper' often acts as a neutered kind of security guard for loss prevention at a supermarket or w/e, though of course they don't have any jurisdiction beyond the property.