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.
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).
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.
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.