Hi everyone! I’m European. And lately, I have been wondering about “mugshots”. If I have understood correctly (but correct me if I’m wrong, that is why I am posting here: to learn!), whenever someone is arrested under the suspicion of some crime, mugshots are taken, and made publically available.
Is this true, or is this just an impression of mine? Can anyone just view the pics of people who have been arrested without being proven guilty?
Thanks in advance to anyone who cares to shed some light on this topic!
Much love to you all from Europe!
Memory <3
In: 331
They are not always made public. There are many different localities, city/county/state/federal, and they have different rules. Some will publicly release the photos, some don’t.
They don’t just haul you off and take pictures if you’re suspected of a crime. Booking criminals doesn’t happen until you’ve been arrested and then charged in a court of law and then they’ll formally finger print you and take the picture.
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in Florida specifically, mugshots and arrest records are classified as public record, so this information is freely accessible. That’s why you see so many posts like “Florida man does X”, not necessarily because there are more wacky illegal things happening there, but because the records are publicly available for news outlets to comb through.
> Can anyone just view the pics of people who have been arrested without being proven guilty?
Yep! The actions of the government in arresting people is public information, and in many states the photographs the state obtains are treated similarly.
As a European you are probably thinking something like “That is crazy, wouldn’t that lead to people being unfairly treated from the stigma of arrest?!” But you should understand that this legal norm is a reaction against the alternative common in Europe where arrests are not public knowledge.
So when someone gets arrested they just… disappear. What happened to Bob? Someone thinks he might be visiting his mother, someone else thinks he just skipped town, other people speculate that maybe it has something to due with him annoying the Mayor. Nobody really knows if he was charged with any crimes, or got a trial (fair or not). The government is free to just snatch up whoever they want and they vanish without a trace.
Isn’t this a major privacy issue?
If you want to see more awful things from Florida law enforcement, check out the POS Sheriff that shared his [“Wheel of Fugitive” posts](https://youtu.be/1Cketgvkmxg?si=cXSmy5yvdmHsIS6j) on social media.
Not sure about mugshots but news outlets post “police blotters”. They publish your name and address and crime accused of…before conviction
So, in a place like Mississippi, where I’m from — which is sort of backwards — they use mugshots as a form of entertainment and even the municipal Facebook pages will blast people publicly for arrests related to shit as a petty as substance abuse,
while where I am now, in Colorado, it usually takes something wildly significant, like interstate interdiction stops yielding multiple pounds of hard drugs or raids on residences producing similar, for such to make it in the headlines.
I think whether or not a state or municipality or county readily publishes the mugshots of its citizenry reflects on how backwards — or not — an area might be classified.
Mugshots are a record keeping tool so we can track inmates and of course use if they escape.
Some states do make them public record due to sunshine laws where they make most government records public. These are government records.
In the town where I went to college, there was a local news magazine (if you could even call it that) that always had a whole page dedicated to public record mugshots that have been taken recently. It wasn’t uncommon to go to a huge party, have that party be busted, and then see pictures of the host or others who were busted at the party. Some took it as a badge of honor to have your picture on the Jail Birds page lol
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