By William Sullivan
The Internet Has Raised Questions on Publishing Mug Shots
A central principle of justice in the United States is that someone is innocent until proven guilty. However, in the United States, mug shots of people arrested are usually considered public documents, even though the people in the photos have not been convicted or charged.
News outlets like the Chicago Tribune, NBC 5 Chicago and the Tampa Bay Times publish them on their websites, expanding the number of people who can see them. Publishing mug shots raises serious ethical questions for the media.
Online, search engines can pull up results in fractions of a second. When media outlets publish a mug shot a Google search will easily turn it up and it creates an online record of someone’s arrest. That raises ethical questions. By publishing names and photos of people arrested, is a media outlet jumping to judgment? What if the crime was not a newsworthy event, like someone driving with a suspended license?
These questions do not have convenient answers. With the advent of the internet, when mug shots are published online by media outlets, that information is readily found by the friends, family, potential landlords and employers of the arrested. And information published on the internet is difficult or impossible to remove. That makes the stakes very high for publishing mug shots.
The Chicago Tribune has a section on its website called Mugs in the News. In it, the Tribune posts mug shots of people accused of crimes from stories they report. The crimes people with mug shots are accused of range from homicide to road rage to marijuana possession.
Below every name, the Tribune has a disclaimer: “Arrest does not imply guilt, and criminal charges are merely accusations. A defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty and convicted.” On the slideshow view of the photos however, that text is in gray, on a dark gray background, which discourages viewers from reading the text.
NBC 5 Chicago has its own gallery, called Mug Shots in the News. NBC does not even have a disclaimer that the people in the mug shots shown are merely accused. NBC has not added mug shots since 2011, which raises questions about whether NBC journalists have been checking to see if those accused have been charged, convicted or found not guilty.
The Tampa Bay Times publishes mug shots on their website. They post mug shots of everyone arrested in four counties in the Tampa Bay Area. They are able to do that because those four counties’ sheriffs put every mug shot online. However, doing Google searches for the names of those arrested does not show their mug shots from the sheriff’s website, it shows their mug shot from the Tampa Bay Times. By publishing those mug shots, the Tampa Bay Times increases their visibility in search results.
In a 2016 lawsuit, three men in Illinois sued a website called mug shots.com and their sister website unpublisharrest.com, according to the New York Times. Unpublisharrest.com charges $399 to remove arrest photos and records from non-law enforcement sources on the internet. That includes from its sister site. A lawyer for the site used the Chicago Tribune’s Mugs in the News feature to defend the business practices of the sites.
Some in the media argue that mug shots should be released to the media and published. In 2013 the Detroit Free press sued the Justice Department to get mug shots. They were supported by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. They lost their case in Federal Court, with the judge arguing that people have a “non-trivial privacy interest” in their mug shots.
A lawyer with The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that releasing mug shots is a demonstration of open government principles and captures an important moment in the criminal process, that of arrest. Yet that does not take into consideration the effects that releasing these mug shots, some from arrests for minor crimes, have on the people arrested.
If media outlets are going to publish mug shots, in the spirit of reporting correctly, they need to emphasize that the people in the mug shots are accused, not convicted. And to be technically correct, they should differentiate between people who are arrested and people who are charged. Not everyone who gets a mug shot photo taken is actually charged with a crime.
If media outlets are not explicit about this, they risk suggesting that the people in the mug shots they publish are guilty of the crime they were arrested for.
Even if mug shots are publicly available, that does not mean that media outlets should publish them. There is a standard of whether or not a crime is newsworthy. Someone driving with a suspended license is not likely to be something worthy of media coverage.
There is a difference between the media publishing a mug shot of someone accused in a major news event, like a terrorist attack or a murder, and someone who was selling drugs on a small scale or driving with a suspended license. Or if someone was found not guilty of a crime, their mug shot could slip through the cracks and remain on a media outlets website.
When the media was mostly in physical newsprint or on TV, publishing a mug shot was different. It was not possible to see the mug shot of someone arrested for a minor crime years ago with a quick search. With the internet, what is published is more easily discovered, more permanent, and has more potential to damage the lives of private individuals who are arrested. That requires media outlets to reevaluate how they handle the publication of mug shots.