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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

Either harm is bad.

If you release arrest records, people who are innocent have their reputations sullied.

If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.

(Why so many arrests that don't lead to charges is interesting. People who prove innocent is one cause, and another is prosecutors only advancing really strong cases to maximize conviction rates is another. These are hard to tell apart.)

So, the right now when we publish arrest records we give police the tool to create some lasting harm to people without strong proof, but make it harder for them to capriciously arrest people or for prosecutors to abuse their discretion.

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I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers. If I have to go down to the county courthouse to get access to the records, then there's a barrier that prevents people from casually googling someone and learning that they were arrested at one point.

If every arrest is published with both first and last name in the local newspaper, which is then archived online and fully indexed, that doesn't seem to be serving the cause of government transparency so much as the cause of sensational local news.

I also think that allowing publication of the arrest but without the full name of the alleged criminal would address concerns about government accountability while not handing a dangerous reputational weapon to the police.

> I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers

I think "this is 'public' information that you can't publish" is a yucky slippery slope.

I think that if we can't define a category like that then the next century is going to be pretty awful in a lot of ways. If "public" automatically means "accessible instantly from anywhere in the world and irreparably archived forever", then we're either going to have to have a lot of stuff pulled from the public space or we're going to have a lot of lives ruined by all kinds of "public" stuff.

Why does it matter?

There are no preordained guarantees that any specific things will be or not be in the “public space”.

> If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.

In Germany, the media aren't legally allowed to publish the full names of suspects, only first name and first letter of surname. What if the law said law enforcement had to release all arrest records promptly to the media, but without surnames or photographs?

Unfortunately many people have unique enough names that that much will be bad enough.

Hot take: you could have professinal journalists who have trafficked in the incidents but reserved publication of them investigate patterns of misbehavior in community institutions like the police.

I mean, you can't now, as we seem to have crossed some kind of rubicon and abandoned investigative professional journalism for blogspam and tabloid, but that had been the functioning alternative for a while there. Maybe we can find a new functioning alternative?

It's a "who will police the police" problem, and letting the police choose who gets to view arrest records isn't going to be a great solution.

You can’t understand the journalism problem until you face that it has always been propaganda and PR. We just didn’t know how bad it was until we had alternative sources.

Maybe there was a little more effort, beyond writing up a tweet or Reddit conversation. But at its core Journalism is narrative crafting (or narrative repeating). And fueled by upper class peer recognition.

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