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Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

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Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#121

Post by darkpicnic »

cabaalis wrote: post #88
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#122

Post by HighPlainsDrftr »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #12
jollybean wrote: post #3

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.

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).

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#123

Post by dodobirdlord »

nradov wrote: post #85
LorenPechtel wrote: post #21

Good idea. 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 c…

Such a law probably wouldn't be Constitutional. Speech can't be compelled.

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.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#124

Post by dodobirdlord »

antihipocrat wrote: post #93
throwawayboise wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#125

Post by Sanzig »

delecti wrote: post #98
cabaalis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#126

Post by kolinko »

duskwuff wrote: post #17
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

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)

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#127

Post by andyroid »

gnull wrote: post #103
pmcollins wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#128

Post by alisonkisk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
andrewla wrote: post #39

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…

> 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.

This doesn't require mug shots.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#129

Post by alisonkisk »

gnull wrote: post #115
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 specif…

They can beat you after the mugshot.

Re: Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

#130

Post by systematical »

andrewla wrote: post #39

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…

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