Police officers are required to display and provide their identification on request–except when they aren’t. There is no federal mandate, nor much punishment, for officers who stay anonymous.
Many of us believe that we can ask any police officer for their name or badge number, and that a refusal to provide it is a violation of the law. We are often outraged when officers conceal their identities, especially when they are suspected of wrongdoing. But even when policy or legislation mandates that they disclose, officers rarely receive punishment if they fail to do so.
Depending on your jurisdiction, which could be city, college, county, or state, officers may have no obligation to wear identification at all, let alone disclose it on request. Moreover, departmental policies that do require identification often allow broad discretion for an officer, or commanders, to suspend the rule if they experience a threat, be it a present danger or existential, such as someone later using that information to harass.
Troy Payne, an assistant professor of justice at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, notes that there are about 18,000 local law-enforcement agencies in the US, all of which operate independently.
“Other than civil liability, after a civil-rights lawsuit, almost all police activity is governed by their own policies and their ability to enforce their policies,” Payne said. Some policies and ideas, in model form, come from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. (The IACP did not reply to a request for an interview.)