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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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 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?
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.
I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but rather that culturally we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality, though this may be by design to create space for exploitation.
A problem with mugshot sites is that they often detail the charges, and sometimes the charges just aren’t something people are going to be tolerant of.
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.
One of the other issues that your comment shines a light on is that police often book someone under multiple charges. A safe one that the person is likely to be able to be convicted on, and multiple charges that probably don't apply to the situation.
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 anything, that feels like an argument in favor of restricting what can be published about arrests and unproven charges in general -- not just the mugshots.
In my country, but I think in EU in general, Police are not allowed anything besides the first name and a first letter of surname. Innocent until proven guilty.
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)
My sister once decided to look up if a particularly lousy co-worker had an arrest record. Turns out he was arrested on charges of domestic battery, but not convicted. Which is why he's been around her workplace so long, it's a big red flag for a hiring manager so he isn't getting a job anyplace else. Now he probably deserved to be arrested, but there's always the chance that he really is innocent, in which case the US justice system has failed him.
When it comes to domestic battery there's a lot of middle ground between guilty and innocent.
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.
I've often done a thought experiment across much of what I read in my local newspaper for people getting picked up... etc.
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.
> but the mugshot and charges will probably be findable on the web for years and years
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.
Well, my issue is that these are issued on arrest because that news feed is considered newsworthy. Their later conviction or lack thereof often doesn't gather nearly as much press.
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.
Well in general there are 3 strike laws... I mean it seems reasonable that people that break rules 3 times need to be separated off from the people not doing that.
You can change the law, but there's no plausible path towards making people less judgemental. It's like saying, "speed limits are misguided, what we really need is a culture of safe driving."
I think the speed limit thing is actually something that traffic engineers think about. You can design roads such that people drive a certain speed. Think about how uncomfortable you'd be driving down a narrow windy road at 60mph, versus the same speed on a multi-lane divided highway. If you want people to drive 20mph, make it hard to navigate at 30mph.
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.
There is an art to this traffic engineering. You can design so that the majority of people drive slowly. You have narrow roads, shared spare with pedestrians. So the edge of the highway is not clear. All of this leans to 85 percentile speed dropping with a much better environment.
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.
I think something like gay rights provides a great example of hundreds of millions of people becoming drastically less judgmental over just a few decades. Of course it involves changes in the law as well, but massive cultural shifts do happen!
We shouldn’t describe the past as extremely one thing. Because when I discovered there was a gay street and plenty of gay clubs in Berlin up to 1934, I started to entirely distrust a lot of things I had been taught about the past. The wedge got driven even further when I learnt Archimedes didn’t say Eureka, Galileo didn’t say “E pur se mueve!” to the pope (so… was he ever imprisoned? did Christians even question the round earth?) and the ILO 1930 treaty against slavery included all humans… except men. Until 1957. Which quite relativizes the narrative about women’s suffrage.
It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.
Yeah for sure, that's not to say it was always a certain way or that it's an inevitable march towards anything, just that massive shifts in culture do happen (and I think as your comment illustrates, cultures changes much faster than we think!).
We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.
There are plausible paths to changing behavior and morality. Prohibition was a failure, but we have had great success reducing the number of nicotine users over the years through public health campaigns.
It is both. Speed limits work because majority of the people respect them. Cops can’t control the entire population, if majority choose to misbehave. This is what it feels like online. People seem to relish in posting other’s misfortune, mistakes etc with little consequences. They do things online that they wouldn’t dare to do in real life.
If the attitude doesn’t change, no amount of laws would help
>It is both. Speed limits work because majority of the people respect them. Cops can’t control the entire population, if majority choose to misbehave. This is what it feels like online.
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.
> Have you never driven on an interstate highway outside of rush hour?
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.
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.
The reality is that one is innocent until proven guilty. 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.
That people think if the cops arrest you, you're no longer innocent is the way bigger issue here.
> The reality is that one is innocent until proven guilty.
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.
Perhaps the problem is that most people are left unexposed to the reality of ridiculous arrest charges.
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...
I'm sure most males at the age of 20 can be sent to prison for dating underage girls (17.5 years old is underage). All you need is to pull them over for speeding, start an argument about something, arrest them for arguing with police, get their phone searched and find evidence in their whatsapp. Bro, in just one year we'll have 25 millions in prisons making big money for the private prison industry.
Absolutely agree with this, I'm not saying we shouldn't have a right to be forgotten, it seems like an easy kludge to implement right now. I'm just musing.
Agree that we should aim to fix problems that have possible real-world solutions today. I think we should also consider how to fix the underlying causes of those problems. These aren't really 'either/or' but 'both', though they are clearly at different stages of the solutioning process and need different kinds and quantities of resources.
> I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but rather that culturally we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality, though this may be by design to create space for exploitation.
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.
>we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up
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.
Fortunately enough, my own mug shot was taken offline when the local news site when bust. It used to be the only thing that came up when you searched me. This happened right at the beginning of my career so I was terrified of the albatross hanging over me. Well, then the pivot-to-video era came and lots of small newspapers and local sites got swallowed up by WickedLocal and the like. I don't think it hindered my career too much.
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.
> 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.
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.
Criminal charges and arrest records are public information. You could not possibly pass a law forbidding someone from displaying public information. And we certainly would not want to pivot to secret court systems.
I think what you really want is just transparency.
Yeah, I think we need to allow publishing them so you can't have secret arrests. What I'm proposing to make criminal is publishing deceptive records. So long as you tell the whole truth, fine.
It would probably pass muster if framed in terms of defamation. Making it statutorily defamation (i.e. you automatically lose civil suits, regardless of your intent to defame) to distribute someone’s arrest record without also distributing their conviction record with equal prominence would probably strike the right balance.
Defamation is already a civil tort. Are you under the impression that the First Amendment protects defamatory speech from being litigated as defamation?
Can't it? Apparently the US government can compel you to act as though your website's records haven't been seized – which includes publishing your weekly “our records haven't been seized” notice.
> In September 2014, U.S. security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote that "every lawyer I've spoken to has indicated that having a 'canary' you remove or choose not to update would likely have the same legal consequences as simply posting something that explicitly says you've received something."[15][16]
Why are names and pictures published before one even know if the person is guilty? And even if found guilty, why does the media use so much personal information?
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 think the idea is that making charges & arrests public keeps the system transparent, and makes it harder for the government to disappear people or otherwise do crazy despotic stuff.
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.
This is the reason. The US justice system is meant to operate in the open, to serve the interests of the public who finances it. Same reason it is generally very difficult to litigate under seal.
Observations about the difference between theory and practice omitted.
The justice system forbids individuals recording the judge but records and could publish every interaction you have with them. That is not operating in a system of openness and transparency.
I doubt the system really is much more transparent than more usual systems that do not blame every potential 'criminal' publicly.
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?
I also think that in the pre-internet world the amount of effort to obtain such public information acted as an effective filter. You actively had to go looking for this information and that involved in-person visits to government buildings and filing paperwork. That gave average people a reasonable degree of cover.
It's a dirty little, not so secret, shameful pastime of America. For the same reason that we love Dr. Phil, live pd, or judge Judy we love feeling better than stupid, ignorant, uneducated, abused, neglected, diseased, impoverished, drug addicted, poor people the narratives crafted to fit the mugshots and clips we see in the news or online.
I highly recommend listening to the latest two parter from Behind the Bastards, about Dr. Phil.
I realize this may be a cynical take, but what if the goal is to prevent us from recording the cops?
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.
I'm wary of the fact that mug shots are made and publicized before any facts, objectivity or legal scrutiny, yet they appear to make the person 'look guilty'. I suggest they shouldn't be public information until sentencing, and then only 'valid' or publishable while a person is incarcerated. I think the idea is supposed to be if you 'server your time' you get a chance to have a normal life again.
Think the original idea for releasing this information was to prevent the police from secretly disappearing people, which has happened quite a bit around the world. The police know, if they take someone into custody, that it will be part of the public record for all to see.
Which is fine when it's just the police making that information available on a short-term, need-to-know basis. When you have third parties (like "mugshot sites") republishing that information in a more lasting and public form, it becomes a problem.
We really need to limit the reasons a person can be taken into custody. There are valid reasons, and we need to evaluate those reasons too. Too often, people just end up in custody (and then depriving the public of their usefulness).
> If you think a mug shot makes someone look guilty, do you not believe someone is innocent until proven guilty?
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.
It doesn't matter what you believe. A significant chunk of people will just assume guilt and repeat/propagate the information, whether through naivete or malice. Having a large number of people saying 'X is a criminal' based solely on the existence of the mugshot is a problem.
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's not so much the assumption of guilt as a kind of 'bias'.
'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.
What are the forces at play here? People don't want to be embarrassed by their mugshot vs people don't want to be discriminated against because of a mugshot vs the transparency of who cops are arresting and why.
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 is an interesting point. One of the the reasons for the Florida Man meme is due to the state's sunshine laws, which makes nearly all government records and proceedings, those dealing with arrest, public. That leads to a lot of embarrassing stories about rednecks molesting alligators, but it also allowed for the uncovering of a massive Minority Report-tier scheme of police officers continually harassing citizens marked by an algorithm as a "potential future criminal"
Mugshots are a form of punishment without being convicted of a crime. The government and police keep plenty of info private before court days, so it can make sense to keep this private too.
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.
I don't understand the mechanics of this, making arrests public prevents secret detention? Do we expect a police force who would like to illegally arrest people would care about adhering to the administrative process of publishing such arrests?
Yeah, I'll grant it's worth considering not making them public until a court date. There are people arguing many different things, including barring the release of the photos to the public totally.
> I think most importantly, arrests need to be publicly available. We have a right to know who the cops are arresting and why
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?
Can someone more clearly explain to me how the transparency laws actually improve transparency in practice?
Why would a police department, who would act in a way malicious enough to disappear people, suddenly start adhering to the requirement of publishing a mugshot of a person they want to disappear?
“Disappear” doesn’t necessarily mean “murder and hide the body”. It can also cover harassing people and completely disrupting their lives by throwing them in jail for a while for no particularly good reason and then not telling anyone until you release them (possibly having beaten or raped them in the meanwhile, and extracted promises of future regime-approved behavior).
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.
Thanks for that, I understand the argument a little more.
If reducing undue harassment and disruption is the reason for publishing mugshots, and it turns out that in practice the mugshots are actually being used by others to harass and disrupt (potentially innocent) people's lives, then maybe it's worth reviewing the practice?
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?
It’s generally recognized (at least in the United States) that limiting the potential for abuse by the government or agents of the government is more important than limiting other forms of abuse. A person has a variety of forms of recourse against non-governmental abuse (including appealing to the government), but the only recourse against abuse by the government is violent revolution. Even when raising a formal complaint against the government, it is the government that adjudicates whether the government’s behavior was abusive. So it is essential, even if it causes other negative side effects, that the government not be able to abuse people in secret, or in ways that it can later deny occurred.
> 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.
I think you actually have that backwards. You can't ban public mugshots and have a free and open society. If arrests can be secret then there is no executive or judicial oversight.
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.
The way I see it, you can either pass a law "banning the pixels" or try to change human nature. Which will be easier and which one will address the issue sooner?
Either way you're ignoring human nature. The other human nature is the nature of power to corrupt, ignored in reducing the transparency of the judicial and executive processes. I can't think of a single historical or contemporary example of government secrecy which has produced morally consistent outcomes. I do not think such things can exist without eventually corrupting the process they serve.
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?
You can still have this information be publicly available without it being easily accessible on the internet. That's the key. I think we need to return to a system where this information is accessible on request, but not something that's easy to find online.
How do you correct the problem of our culture treating the accused poorly?
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?
I suppose one step we can take is to not put so much blind faith in cops. They get arrests wrong. I do think politicians, cops and the media all have a role to play though.
There are already laws that protect certain classes of individuals in situations like housing and employment. It's not hard to apply these laws to other classes.
>If our culture treats the accused poorly, that's not the fault of nor is it caused by public mugshots.
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.
A mug shot does not provide publicly relevant information. It is very much the opposite: a direct invasion of an individual's privacy. I didn't consent to that picture being next to my name. Frankly, it's crazy that any mug shot is ever available on the Internet, unless it's on some kind of "wanted" list.
Considering that the status quo is currently that literally asking the individual and querying the source of truth to confirm the history of an individual directly for the purpose of discrimination are ubiquitous practices... yes, I think such laws would be very effective in reducing discrimination on the basis of criminal and judicial history.
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.
These laws exist. You’re not allowed to discriminate based on criminal or arrest record unless it’s relevant to the job (e.g. someone applying to be a delivery driver with 3 DUIs).
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.
"Ban the box" laws have proven effective in reducing employment discrimination in several states. These laws prohibit employers from asking job applicants for most types of jobs about prior arrests or convictions.
I don't have such a defeatist attitude. I think it would contribute overall to lessening the stigma of being accused of a crime. Politicians, cops and the media all have a part to play in this, though.
I agree. The US Government was founded on the idea of transparency, the people, are the ultimate power.
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.
How comes the rest of the modern world does not have these issues you mention of people disappearing then we do not openly blame all of them with mugshots? Home comes the country with by far the most police brutality in the modern world thinks their system is working?
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.
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.