“Mug shot galleries presented without context may feed into negative stereotypes and, in our editorial judgment, are of limited news value,” Gannett has stated. Those sites are now run under the banner of Gannett, which merged last year with GateHouse and had already removed mug shot galleries from its sites, said Amalie Nash, USA Today Network vice president for local news and audience development. Last month, dozens of outlets once owned by the newspaper chain GateHouse Media said they would stop using slide shows of mug shots that were not part of a news article. Many newsrooms have already started removing mug shot galleries, citing the same reasoning. “This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Chief Scott said in a statement. William Scott, the San Francisco police chief, announced on Wednesday that his department would no longer release mug shots of people who had been arrested unless there was an immediate public safety reason to do so. It’s a practice as old as the mug shot itself: publicizing an unflattering close-up of a person’s face and profile, taken at one of the worst possible moments.Īnd in some police departments and newsrooms across the country, it may be on its way out. So that could have lasting effects on an individual’s prospects for employment and other opportunities.įor more than a century, police departments and news organizations have worked together to disseminate photos of people after their arrest, often bleary-eyed and despondent, sometimes defiant and smiling. And when a person gets arrested and a mug shot is released to the public, or a picture or an image of people released - particularly nowadays where it can be on the internet for forever - oftentimes or sometimes anyway, people are never convicted of those crimes. Our whole criminal justice system is based on innocent until proven guilty. Short of that, we won’t be releasing it immediately to the media or on our department social media sites. If we are looking for a person who is wanted, and that booking photo will help bring closure to that issue or that person is at risk, or a person is at risk, and the booking photo will help resolve that situation. If there is a danger or a threat to the community, and a booking photo would warn the community of that danger. It really prohibits the release of booking photos except for a couple of situations.
So our policy, our booking photo policy, has been changed whereas it’s much more restrictive. Send us feedback.Transcript San Francisco Police Department to Limit the Release of Mug Shots San Francisco’s police chief announced that the department won’t release mug shots of people who have been arrested unless they posed a public safety threat. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'mug shot.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2021 Throughout the two days of arguments, a large poster board display has had been set up in the middle of Donnelly’s courtroom, which included a mug shot of Kelly in the center and various members of his ever-revolving entourage surrounding him. Washington Post, 29 June 2021 Aside from a 1978 mug shot, and a few videos found in a raid of a Shining Path safe house, this was the first time that the country had been able to lay eyes on its tormentor, now trapped and humiliated, on display like an animal in a zoo.ĭaniel Alarcón, The New Yorker, 19 Sep. 2021 Government databases vary from the Bureau of Prison’s collection of 8,000 employee and contractor photos, to the Office of Biometric and Identity Management’s massive trove of 836 million passport, mug shot and visa application pictures. 2021 His medical condition was not released but a mug shot showed no sign of a ventilator. 2021 That tattoo is consistent with the tattoo seen in Reed's mug shot. 2021 The agency also released a mug shot of the heavily tattooed escapee, described as 5 feet, 5 inches and 150 pounds with sandy blond hair, a goatee and hazel eyes.
2021 His name and mug shot were beamed to screens across the country. Recent Examples on the Web In his mug shot, Vallejo appeared freshly shaved, his beard gone.