plainclothes

[playn-klohz, -klohthz]

adjective

1. wearing civilian clothing, or plain clothes, instead of a uniform, especially of police officers on duty.

Example Sentences

Police Chief Charlie Beck’s tenure, when Harris was a U.S. senator, plainclothes officers served as security and traveled with her from January 2017 to July 2018.

From Los Angeles Times

Or, as Elkady noted in his interview with Salon, the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University student and greencard holder Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested earlier this year and transfered to a Louisiana detention center before a court ordered his release more than 100 days later, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, originally from Turkey, who was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents in March and held in a processing facility for 45 days.

From Salon

In the summer of 2020, 18 years after the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, New York City finally disbanded its infamous anti-crime unit, which frequently used aggressive jump-out tactics, but Mayor Eric Adams brought back a “modified plainclothes anti-gun unit” just a few weeks after taking office in 2022.

From Slate

On the night of March 1, 2022, four police officers in Philadelphia’s South task force, a plainclothes jump-out squad tasked with finding illegal guns, jumped out on the 12-year-old Siderio and another juvenile from an unmarked police car.

From Slate

Diane Bass, Velez’s attorney, said the incident occurred when masked, unidentified men in plainclothes pulled up to question a downtown L.A. street vendor.

From Los Angeles Times