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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over.

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.

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> resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over

Note that these laws originated from a civil rights perspective. Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people.

> 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.

I think it's just that some solutions are worse than their problems, and it's not always possible to know which are which beforehand.

I think it's one of those things that has changed due to the greatly reduced friction involved in accessing information as a result of the web.

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.

If you run for political office, you can bet your opponents will mine the internet for anything they can use against you, no matter how long ago.

There was a NASCAR driver who lost his sponsorship over something his father said before he was born.

You're describing one of my favorite mental models: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

This is nonsensical; if they're not following the law they will simply ... not publish the mugshots.

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).

Some procedures are harder to violate without getting caught than others.

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.

why not give the suspect a choice? would you prefer your mugshot be published online, google-able for years, or would you rather not, and risk getting ‘disappeared’ by your local police dept without a trace. i know which one i’d choose.

What about a mugshot protects you?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-man-choked-smiling-mugshot/s...

That's actually worse than either option - if the police decide to disappear you they can now claim you opted out, while if they prefer to ruin you reputation, they can subtly (or not so subtly, if they expect to get away with that) pressure you to opt in.

Scariest f** to even have to talk like this.

How do you verify that the convict made the choice, and that they weren't forced to or tortured?

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.

> This is a good reason to make it mandatory to publish mugshots.

Is it really though? Doesn’t seem like a necessary practice anywhere else in the world.

That would provide no protection against being disappeared, and potentially make things more dangerous for people in that situation.

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.

> Assume police do disappear people.

Then it is also easy to imagine that the same police would not take mugshots of the people they want to disappear.

Meaning if you could prove police arrested someone and they could not produce a mugshot, something is wrong. Providing them a way to deny the mugshot without being suspicious gives them more options.

Couldn't the police just take a mugshot, confirm the arrest, and say "this person was later released without charge, none of our business where they are now"?

This happens, but between most people having friends/family and high profile cases having groups outside the station, this causes problems for the police. The proposed change gives them more time without needing to deal with those problems.

You can only protect people in general, not one specific person. If the police want to kill you they'll get away with it.

Still it's better to make it harder for them.

* Assume police do disappear people. *

Chicago PD says hello.

No assumption needed. American police do disappear people, at least temporarily.

I don't think this is as easy as we would like it to be.

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.

That’s already the case. You can file a foia request.

I'm late to the party, but PDs frequently reject FOIA requests with the justification that there is an "ongoing investigation", particularly in the case of activists (since their ongoing activism is apparently considered justification for indefinite investigation).

First, I don’t see a reason why just a name would not be good enough as opposed to the mug shot itself.

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.”

> I don’t see a reason why just a name would not be good enough as opposed to the mug shot itself.

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-...

The suspect may not an ID with them. Waiting until you identify the person is an extra opportunity for them to disappear.

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).

They can beat you after the mugshot.

In what way? As long as it's a small enough number of people needing to be disappeared, it can be done while still publishing arrests of everyone else! It's not as if the person under detention can check.

Before the Great Lockdown, that would result in the friends, family, and coworkers of the disappeared person contacting police and then media to find them.

This doesn't require mug shots.

I've heard that thrown around before and... that doesn't make any sense. How would it be harder? If the police were to "disappear somebody", how would it be any more difficult to simply not release information about it? In fact, it seems like it'd be easier to "disappear" certain people, because they could claim they had nothing to do with it because they report others just fine.

My local police department posts mugshots on their Twitter, sends copies to the local newspaper, and types up a detailed report for the local radio station for _every_ _single_ _interaction_.

"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.

That’s crazy.

It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information.

The police could chill out though and not make a bad situation worse.

There's a difference between the information simply being "public" and a social media account blasting out people's mugshots on Twitter.

I think, importantly, that there is no difference. Once the information is out there, it's out there. You can attempt to have a "right to be forgotten" but that's just relying on people to voluntarily comply. If I have a jpeg no force in the world can make me delete it if I want to preserve it.

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.

> It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information.

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.)

I agree that all of this info is public anyways - and back in the day I bet you could go to the library and look it all up.

But having it blasted out on a public radio program every week is too much for me.

This isn't a "small town" thing. This is a "rich enough to afford a police department bigger than they need so the police can justify spending the man hours on BS" town thing. It happens in plenty of medium sized towns and small cities.

If the cops were stretched thin busting meth labs or dealing with Real Crime(TM) they wouldn't be doing that.

It's probably office staff, not the cops, who have the Twitter account.

And who's budget pays the office staff?

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.

> 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.

Yeah. I considered adding a few sentences to the tune of "the politicians won't stick their necks out covering this waste unless they think there's political gain for them so this is really a reflection of the priorities of the people in the town" but felt that would drag things toward the direction of nit picking over what the people actually want.

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.

You don't have to have a badge to investigate crime. These staff hours are not being effectively allocated.

> for _every_ _single_ _interaction_.

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.

Yes, a simple traffic stop will not lead to a mugshot.

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)

>A severe driving incident and an impounded car might.

E.g. giving the cop attitude after being pulled over for the crime of being the only one around to pull over at 1am.

To be clear, no they don't post a mugshot for a traffic stop.

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.

Salt Lake County now makes you pay one dollar for a mugshot. That ended websites reposting the pictures.

> I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over.

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.

That would be a toothless law: some noname image board hosted in Somalia won't bother to respect US laws. Even US based firms won't care much because who's going to enforce the law? DAs on their own initiative? People on the mugshots?

thinking similar..

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.

Many public record requests need a notarized request and a $10 fee, in particular marriage licenses. Even getting a copy for your own personal records. $10 dollars in today's money is nothing, but in volume adds up quickly, as do notarizing fees, and the hassle of scheduling a public notary etc.

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.

I think this is a good approach for many public records: add just the right amount of friction to the process. Just because a record is public doesn't mean it needs to be published in a readily accessible database.

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