Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that
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Unless it serves a legitimate law enforcement end, either as part of a punishment for being convicted of a crime or to aid the public in the search for a fugitive, it should simply not ever be released to the public in any form. And frankly the former seems inhumane for all but the most serious crimes.
"John Doe was pulled over by X police Saturday afternoon for a speeding violation. Jane Y was ..."
And every Sunday, the local station plays these. So you know every single person who was pulled over. The vehicle they drive. Etc. Small towns are a special sort of hell.
You get pulled over and your grandma is on your case about it. What's really sad is you get used to hearing "resisting a police officer" as their supposed reason for getting brought in - you'll get one a month usually.
The police could chill out though and not make a bad situation worse.
Public "but only available if you go to city hall" is at least a little more restrictive until Zillow sends out people to start scanning public documents so they can build up their data.
Not public is really the best way to go; and here it sounds like the town has decided that part of the punishment for minor civil infractions is to be put in stocks in the town square, which might once have been enough to shame people into not stealing horses, but now carries a stigma that could last for your entire life.
Interactions that don’t result in charges will not. (That doesn’t mean some of it, at least, is not still technically public information that would be disclosable in response to a sunshine request, but there is a difference between that and publicly-advertised information.)
But having it blasted out on a public radio program every week is too much for me.
If the cops were stretched thin busting meth labs or dealing with Real Crime(TM) they wouldn't be doing that.
It's all under the same municipal umbrella at the end of the day. You can't get away with (at least not easily and not for a long period of time) wasting man-hours ($$$) on stuff that has no positive impact toward whatever metrics you are evaluated against (crime stats in the case of the cops) when resources are tight.
Most police departments are not really evaluated on crime stats, they are evaluated against the political satisfaction of the locally politically powerful (which tend to be the local economic elites.)
Who is hurt by crime (and who gets away with it) is usually more important than the level of crime.
That said, at the small town level having less crime than the next town over is generally how you please everyone so there's a pretty good overlap between what the powers that be want the cops to deliver and "less crime".
Police performance is kind of a malleable and hard to pin down thing.
I bet not, and that there is considerable selectivity (both based on legal mandates and police discretion) as to which interactions are reported and which facts about them are reported. Reporting a lot, however, is a good way of creating the impression that everything is being reported.
A severe driving incident and an impounded car might.
As to just reporting incidents, I would imagine reporting non-convictions might be illegal. (though the people looking for say minority harassment might love the public data)
E.g. giving the cop attitude after being pulled over for the crime of being the only one around to pull over at 1am.
I mean that for all traffic stops (or at least, quite a damn few) they will report the full name, and the crime which tends to be speeding or a traffic violation.
One degree up you'll get the speeding infraction _and_ they didn't have insurance or a suspended license.
I've listened to this program every week for months now. I wish I was kidding.
Note that these laws originated from a civil rights perspective. Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people.
I see this so much in our society. A reaction to a "bad" practice which was actually invented to combat another "bad" practice. It leads me to believe there is just no way to contractualize human behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.
Back in the 70s, if you wanted to get a copy of a mugshot from an arrest, you'd have to go drive down to the appropriate government office (county clerk's office, courthouse, etc) and file a request. If you were in a different state, maybe you could file a request by mail, maybe you couldn't. The point is, it was enough of a hassle that you generally wouldn't bother unless you needed to. And even then, if you went and got copies of all the mugshots in the county, what are you going to do with them? Print a flyer and hand it out on the street?
The internet changed all that. Now you can hoover up all the mugshots you want with an electronic request (some police departments even put them on their websites, so you can scrape away). You publish them online, and then Google indexes them and you've got a quasi-legal blackmail racket set up.
As a society, I don't think we've quite come to terms yet with what mass access to indexed datasets over the internet means. Write a somewhat-regrettable letter to the editor of a local paper back in 1990 that got published? There's a good chance that's been digitized, OCR'd, and is available through a simple database search of your name.
There was a NASCAR driver who lost his sponsorship over something his father said before he was born.
Besides, the police have no need to "disappear" people when they have guns and an almost impossible to challenge right to fire indiscriminately into dwellings (Breonna Taylor).
Not all cops will cooperate with the corrupt ones. And if some of them want you to disappear, they will need to hide it from the others; procedures are intended to make this harder.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-man-choked-smiling-mugshot/s...
This is a good reason to make it mandatory to publish mugshots.
You can make mugshots visible only to some trusted list of human right activist organizations. This is kind of a compromise between convict's safety and privacy.
Is it really though? Doesn’t seem like a necessary practice anywhere else in the world.
Assume police do disappear people. Opting for your record to be public would show police that you're willing to cause problems for them, making the prospect of getting rid of you more appealing. Further, if some associate of yours goes to find out what has happened to you, they can just lie and say you opted for a private record and send the person away.
Then it is also easy to imagine that the same police would not take mugshots of the people they want to disappear.
Chicago PD says hello.
No assumption needed. American police do disappear people, at least temporarily.
If they are posting mugshots online, maybe they should also be required to post all police interaction's with the public online (including bodycam footage, etc).
Or maybe none of it should be posted online, and if you are interested in it, you have to go to the courthouse and get the record.
I think the problem really is deeper than that. I think all government actions should be public within a reasonable time.
Now we have to define reasonable time. Ughh.
Second, it seems that this same justification could be used to justify a lot of privacy breakdowns. For example:
Question: “Why are the suspects naked in the mugshots?”
Answer: “This is actually a civil rights thing to show that they were not beaten up during their arrest. Before, police would hit suspects where their clothes would cover the injuries, but with naked mug shots published on the Internet, they can’t do that any more.”
Name overlap, misspellings, alternate spellings, fake names, aliases, nicknames, no names.
Let me bust out what, by this time, is an old trope: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Naked mugshots can be a solution in some places. Some write that in Russia police can beat the confession out of you, keep you for a couple of weeks in jail until the visible wounds heal and then send you to court together with the confession you signed.
Naked mugshots will not help in this specific situation, because the court is corrupt together with cops and they will just ignore the procedures. But if I had a choice, I'd prefer a naked mugshot to torture (and of course, they can torture you without leaving any traces; with electricity, for example).
I suppose they could also release future mug shots with a license that the images can't be distributed past such-and-such a date.
mugshots still available to the public - however they must be obtained on an individual request basis, that comes with a license not to republish at all.
This way anyone can get a mugshot - but no one can legally republish it -
tech can give them tools to embed hidden artifacts to prove a republished pic was shared by person 1032 or whatever.
This protects people from being dissipated and can help with lawyers and such, while protecting privacy from republishers that would be subject to dmca and such.
I suppose similar could be done with names being posted online to some extent(?) - proprietary intellectual property?
A way for family and lawyers to keep up with people but keeps others from profiting on public shame / ransom to take down..
legally could expand on laws similar to "it is illegal to photograph a person when that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy if that photograph would "offend or embarass an ordinary person" or if the photograph was taken for the "purpose of sexual arousal or gratificaiton of the defendant." Tenn. Code Ann. §39-13-605. "
Having and republishing 'illegal' photos or something.
All this reminds me of a saas idea I had some years ago about bail/lawyer/and notify your saved list of people - if your name is found in public arrest records online.
Now I'm also thinking about people just iframing the police site - may need to hide photos on screen and only show if click/tap to agree to terms then show.
I've had many thoughts on these things, should complete them more one of these days.
Any family member can pull your scummy Uncle's marriage certificate(s) from all 50 states, but it's gonna cost you and it's going to take more than 15 minutes, which is a pretty good hurdle to prevent mass collection of records. It's not perfect, but I haven't seen a leaked db of marriage certificates leaked online, yet.
For example, I know a young man who traded nude photos on his phone with a girlfriend who was just below the age of consent, got caught, and was arrested and charged with "sexual exploitation of a minor". Once in court, those charges were easily plea-bargained away, but the mugshot and charges will probably be findable on the web for years and years, and changing the public’s kneejerk reaction of disgust and hatred at those charges (after all, the actual context isn’t there for them to read) isn’t something that I would be optimistic about.
Press also never publishes the surname, although they can publish occupation or other non-identifying information.
This has lead to an amusing situation when press articles appeared one day: “John X., a son of an ex-president was charged with causing a car crash”.
As a side note, even conviction records are sealed, because you have a right to expunge any conviction 5 years after you served your term. Records being public would stay online forever otherwise. (In places where you need to not be a convicted felon, you can obtain a government certificate to show as a proof)
This is common because it gives prosecutors the power to "offer" to drop the higher charges in exchange for accepting a plea bargain to the lower, and likely more appropriate, charges.
The result of this is that booking information, with the photos, from a drunken bar fight might show the person was charged with assault with a deadly weapon when the final charge will end up being something like disorderly conduct.
If we didn't have drugs, or if we didn't drive, would the police have much to do? Probably not.
When it comes to drugs, we make drug users much more evil than they are.
When it comes to driving, its a relatively new thing in the history of the human race.
I firmly think the law should be there to protect us from others, and not ourselves.
Don't forget, the police have there agenda too. They want to grow their departments and look great at solving crime.
The individual officers are just enforcing what they are told to enforce, and behave how they should. They just are following the orders that the legislatures are giving us.
TBH... I don't believe people belong in jail unless they are a threat to others. We should take the extreme crimes and put people in prison for those. People that hurt or kill others do either need a break from society, or should have a 'permanent' break from society.
The rest, we just need to try to reform, and keep on making them functional in this society. Its a far less burden.
Just my $0.02.
America has adopted what's called the Duluth model, which recognizes, correctly, that men are the more dangerous partner in a domestic relationship with a man and a woman in it. This has... consequences, in terms of who gets arrested, and who can therefore press charges.
When a couple get into a physical altercation, it's pretty common that neither of them looks very good, behavior-wise, to an outside observer. But it has to be pretty open-and-shut assault by the woman, usually with a weapon causing serious injury, for arrest and charges to fall on her shoulders.
Although if the guy was the kind of dude where your sister thought "hey, I wonder if this guy has a record?" well, that tells its own story, doesn't it?
Pretty good argument for not publishing mugshots, though: if a woman starts throwing shit at her boyfriend, and comes at him with her fists, and he pushes her away, he's probably going to spend a night in jail if the police get called due to all the hollering. No court date or (additional) jail time, though, just gets his stuff back and goes home.
The injustice is that this person was charged in the first place. The court system is public, and must remain that way. We could remove the mugshot, but that won’t help people like the one you’ve described.
The problem with that is that such a "should" doesn't change the "are", and that it's unlikely to change any time soon. So we need to acknowledge reality and try to find a fix that works within that reality.
That people think if the cops arrest you, you're no longer innocent is the way bigger issue here.
A fight-fire-with-fire strategy might be that the government should aim to arrest all citizens at least once before age 25 and charge them with something ridiculous before dropping the charges. Ok after thinking about it for two seconds that may be a very stupid idea, but still...
The *principle* is that one is innocent until proven guilty.
The reality is that not every person adheres to that principle in every situation when it comes their own internal judgement of people.
> I'm not interested in weakening this fundamental right to accommodate people who are uncomfortable admitting the fallibility of the police or our justice system.
The problem is that they aren't asking you to accommodate them. They already are there, perfectly accommodated, in the state of prematurely judging people's innocence.
The reality is that any policy has to work by improving this not ideal situation.
we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up.
I'd say we can demonstrate our collective tolerance through efforts like the right to be forgotten and disallowing criminal record questions.
It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality.
It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.
We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.
There is probably an art to this, and it's not as easy in practice as the popular books I've read on it claim. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is part of the "neighborhood slow zones" project. That means they put a speed bump midway down the street, which is a popular way to bypass some traffic lights on the way to the BQE. People drive 90 miles an hour right up until the speed bump, slam on the brakes, and then accelerate back up to maximum cruising speed. It doesn't really serve much purpose. (Meanwhile, if you got rid of the curb, and people's lawn furniture / outdoor dining started impinging on available space, it would be impossible to drive more than 5mph. But, there's no political will to block the street like that -- what if a fire truck got stuck and people died in a fire! So it will never ever happen.)
But, like tolerance, it's something we can work on if we choose to.
But (there is always a but), for visually impaired people it does not work that well. For example no kerb edges. For idiots (think stronger word than that), they will drive at the still high speed - at then the accident are worse (severity of outcomes) so it fails.
Speed bumps just are not good - better with a chicane or shuttle working which allows an emergency vehicle to go straight through the obstacle.
>If you want people to drive 20mph, make it hard to navigate at 30mph. There is a wide range of driving skills - design sometime has to account for the worst. Making driving test harder - is a political problem not a technical problem. Driver assist means road get easier to navigate. Driver assist enforcing the speed limit ... is a political problem not a technical problem.
If the attitude doesn’t change, no amount of laws would help
Have you never driven on an interstate highway outside of rush hour?
People go the speeds they deem reasonable for the conditions. Sometimes this is in the ballpark of the speed limit. In many situations it is much faster. People don't follow unenforceable rules unless they agree with them.
If "the majority are misbehaving" the definition of "misbehaving' needs to be adjusted.
Yeah some of these comments are from people who obviously don’t drive much. If you are driving the speed limit on a big highway you are legitimately at risk of causing an accident.
It can be pretty horrible for a person when a Google search primarily finds articles, along with a mugshot, about a crime that they didn't commit.
Absolutely. Even politicians.
Perhaps that will happen over time given the ever-increasing opportunities for record keeping inherent in databases, the internet, and ubiquitous surveillance devices in everybody's back pocket.
But, as that ain't happening anytime soon, maybe this is mostly a lesson in the importance of financial freedom and self-employment. If your future includes FAANGs or the .gov, or any other sizable employer, hewing to the hivemind becomes ever more important.
That's "perfect being the enemy of the good" logic. Your solution might be more ideal in some sense, but it's also not realistic to implement. It's not too much different than saying the real issue is that we have crime in the first place. After all, if we didn't have crime, we wouldn't have police nor mugshots being albatrosses for some people.
For the record, I was found innocent. But that doesn't mean your mug shot gets taken down.
Recently I tried to procure a copy of it for my own records (it's a pretty funny photo as I'm wearing a ridiculous outfit and have a shall we say altered expression) but it's quite a lot of paperwork for an individual to get it, at least in my state.
I'd also like to see a law making it criminal for a site to post such information without also obviously posting that charges are dropped. You have one week to either take it down entirely or clearly mark it as dropped. If neither is done the post will be considered extortion.
A very minor burden on news sites that have to update old articles. A big burden on the extortionist websites. And by making it a criminal matter it doesn't matter if the site is hosted offshore.
Not only should it be criminal, but people should also be able to file civil suits for damages against businesses that are willing to expend resources to dig up and publish criminal charges and arrest records, but refuse to expend any resources to follow up on their published claims.
It's one thing when tabloids parade around dirt on public figures, it's another thing entirely when the same is done to private individuals.
I think what you really want is just transparency.
Arrest type information just needs to be more publicly available so these secondary sites don’t need to exist.
In my country it's always anonymous in the media, unless it's a person the media deems as the public having an interest in knowing about (political figure or so).
I highly recommend listening to the latest two parter from Behind the Bastards, about Dr. Phil.
Part 1 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Part 2 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
The whole darn podcast is great too. I'm not associated, or donating, nor do I even listen to the ads, I'm just a satisfied listener.
In practice I'm not convinced it was net-beneficial before the Internet, and I'm almost certain it's not in an Internet-equipped world.
Observations about the difference between theory and practice omitted.
Or in another world, if that openness does anything good how comes the US has one of the biggest issues with police violence from all the developed world?
Today the law is a nice friendly "dont put mugshots on the internet" and within a few years the actual practice of the law is you can no longer film a cop abusing his power because "perp hasnt been convicted, put your phone away"
I guess I have absolutely no trust. Any law our government passes is just part of long con to take away our liberties.
I realize this is a pessimistic hot take on what appears at face to be a good law.
Perhaps that the real issue. People don't understand how the justice system works. People put too much blind faith in cops.
Some people do it because it fits a political agenda, other people are credulous fools who believe they can see evil by looking at the eyes in a photograph, and of course mugshots are like passport photographs in that they have unflattering direct lighting/straight on posture, subjects are discouraged from smiling etc.
'It doesn't make you good look good', or it 'kind of makes you look guilty'.
I think most people recognize that it doesn't imply guilt, but it's a strong signal in that direction.
A person who gets a mugshot, and is subsequently let off the hook ... doesn't really recover from the stain of bad PR.
A mugshot could ruin a CEO's career for example, in law there is exoneration, but in populism there often isn't. Or not like that. They'd have to hire a PR firm to do a public reparation of their image.
For those who are actually guilty of course it's less relevant.
The US justice system, at least, officially does not believe that, or else pre-trial detention wouldn't be punitive. When jail starts looking like a college dorm, I'll be convinced otherwise.
I don't know if laws should care about someone being embarrassed. I'm kind of surprised about this anti-transparency rhetoric coming someone who started a Libertarian think tank (but maybe I shouldn't be).
I can sympathize with those who think having their arrest record publicized will lead to discrimination, but I don't think hiding mugshots will have much of an effect on that. Plus, if that's an issue we want to solve, then make laws that actually target discrimination because of arrest record & laws that otherwise protect the rights of those accused of crimes.
I think most importantly, arrests need to be publicly available. We have a right to know who the cops are arresting and why, lest people start disappearing or jailed for mysterious reasons (or for looking a certain way). In general, I think our government isn't nearly transparent enough...
That's a good point, but on the other side there is the (very important) presumption of innocence. If I'm arrested, but not convicted of any crime (or possibly not even charged), why should that be a public record that will haunt me forever?
If our culture treats the accused poorly, that's not the fault of nor is it caused by public mugshots.
If you're arrested under false pretenses (just google search "cops planting drugs" to see countless videos), how do we prevent life-long impact of innocent people?
Unfortunately, we can't just tell everyone "stop trusting arrest reports" because that just isn't how the world works.
The problem is companies will compare 2 equal candidates, but one with an arrest record. The one without the arrest will get the job.
Do you have any other ideas?
You can ban treating them illegally though. There's a difference between embarrassment and discrimination.
But you can make charged and convicted statuses a protected class, and ban its consideration in any context as has been done for other protected classes. After all, if we believe that the process of justice rectifies wrongs, then the matter should be closed when the process has been completed. If we do not believe that the process of justice functionally rehabilitates and fairly rectifies, such that consideration of history beyond the closure of a matter is necessary, then what exactly is the aim of that process?
We could also educate the public about the purpose of the justice system, moral complexity in the assignment of responsibility in the light of historical/social/environmental/economic factors, psychology of criminality and rehabilitation, and the frequency of successful rehabilitation and subsequent significant contribution.
Pixels aren't the problem, the behavior of dehumanization is the problem.
As I said below in another thread, banning discrimination on the basis of judicial and criminal history would immediately and obviously "change human nature" because the practice of discrimination on the basis of these histories occurs openly as a best practice under standing precedent in almost every area of society.
It's literally on application forms -- how can you NOT think that requiring "the question" to be absent from the form would change the conversation about this kind of discrimination?
Not sure how that works. Another person taking action between a cause and effect does not remove the cause from being responsible for the effect. For example, if I file a false police report and someone is arrested, I can't claim it isn't my fault because the police should've done a better job checking the report before arresting. The police were part of the cause, but so was my false report.
Requiring that the police make public who they have arrested and why ensures that person’s family and friends, and especially importantly, their lawyer, can find out where they have vanished to and why, and bring it to the attention of a judge and the public immediately if the arrest was nefarious. This way if the police want to use disappearance as a harassment tactic, they have to escalate all the way to “murder and hide the body”, or they will eventually have to face justice when they finally release the person and reveal that they had been holding them the entire time in secret.
Where I'm from most minor criminal convictions on a persons the record are essentially wiped clean after 10 years (technically 'spent', and won't appear in normal police checks). It is illegal for people to obtain information about a spent conviction and use that information unless it is related to sexual abuse or violent crime.
Another thing, what happens to the people who don't have a lawyer or whose friends and family don't have the resources to take on the police department in the event that the police detain and abuse them? Who would they be able to call in that situation to seek justice if the same police who committed the crime are receiving the call?
> Another thing, what happens to the people who don't have a lawyer or whose friends and family don't have the resources to take on the police department in the event that the police detain and abuse them? Who would they be able to call in that situation to seek justice if the same police who committed the crime are receiving the call?
In theory, assuming the police don’t entirely disappear someone, they will eventually be released or have to be tried in court. In either case they would then be in a position to report local police misconduct to either a regional authority like a county sheriff, or to the FBI, which has a general mandate to investigate abuses of people’s rights.
In practice, the rule of law can be thin on the ground outside of metropolitan areas. Police departments are small and tight-knit, judges are extremely friendly with the police, juries are extremely likely to rubber-stamp whatever charges local police want to happen, and police and prosecution are likely to “forget” about a wide variety of standards and public disclosure requirements.
Do you honestly think such laws would be effective?
If we have not even said that it is wrong, then it's going to happen. Saying that it is wrong and should stop happening is the first incremental step in reducing its rate of occurrence.
The problem is that between two equally qualified candidates, if one has a record and the other is clean, it can be pretty easy to justify just throwing the first one out. And pretty hard to prove that that’s why you were rejected.
I think the main reason why they are public is so the police cant just disappear someone when they were arrested for potentially political reasons, and their political supporters can start responding when it happens, same with why court cases are publicly accessible.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
Nothing in the government should be secret forever. I realize we have national security. We shouldn't allow them to hide information from us forever. We need newer guidlines on this. Eg - after the government does something, maybe it should be brought out into the open after a certain period of time - a year - months - whatever - but it is something that we should demand.
I honestly do not understand what mugshots have to do with anything at all. All I see is invading of these people's privacy if they want or not.