Toronto Police are investigating whether numerous officers on G20 duty failed to wear proper identification.

At issue is whether officers violated a force requirement to wear epaulettes with their badge numbers and name tags on their uniforms, regardless of whether they’re wearing riot equipment or standard police outfits.

“It’s a professional standards issue and/or potentially an issue of misconduct. It’s rightly being looked at by (the) Professional Standards (unit),” police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray said.

Police flagged the issue for internal review after the Star showed police four photographs in which officers appear not to be wearing name tags. Officers have been required to wear name tags since the police services board demanded them in 2005 in a bid to make policing more transparent and accountable.

Missing name tags could lend themselves to protecting police misconduct, potentially keeping people from identifying individual officers when filing complaints, said Nathalie Des Rosiers, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“It raises the prospect that rogue police officers who decided to protect themselves individually and prefer not to be identified knew that they were breaking the law — and that’s a problem,” she said.

Before the summit, Des Rosiers said, the association wrote to Police Chief Bill Blair with its concerns that officers might remove their name tags and badge numbers. The practice was condemned when several officers did it during the London G20 summit in 2009.

“There is no excuse. It’s not to be anti-police to demand good policing in line with international standards,” Des Rosiers said. “It’s a symptom of disengagement and disregard of (Toronto police’s) own good policing practices.”

Potential violations captured in the photographs will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, Gray said.

However, she declined to comment on the images directly.

“I don’t want to comment on those individual photos because I don’t fully understand the circumstances behind those individual photos. It wouldn’t be appropriate to make a comment or to speculate on the situation,” she said.

“I think it would be fair to say that that may be one of the issues the after-action team decides to look at.”

The decision to require name and number tags, backed by Chief Bill Blair, followed a drawn-out, contentious debate. Multiple reports, including a highly critical review of the police justice system by a former Superior Court chief justice, called for visible name tags to be part of police uniforms.

At a 2004 meeting, the board dismissed the argument of York University professor emeritus Harvey Simmons that names are easier to remember than badge numbers in the heat of an encounter with police.

“Even when badge numbers are visible, given the charged atmosphere in which encounters with the police often take place, when people are excited or nervous, an average member of the public is highly unlikely to remember to note, memorize or write down an officer’s badge number,” Simmons said.

In a scathing report on London police’s “inadequate” handling of the G20 protests, the Queen’s Inspector of Constabulary recommended that the police don clear identification at “all times during public order operations and deal with individual officer non-compliance swiftly and robustly.”

The police commissioner had pledged that any officers caught deliberately covering their badge numbers would be fired.

However, a year after the summit, a second report revealed that there had been no formal discipline of the officers who failed to wear their badges, nor their supervisors.

A few officers were given a verbal warning.