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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Just my $0.02.
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.
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.
we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up.
I'd say we can demonstrate our collective tolerance through efforts like the right to be forgotten and disallowing criminal record questions.
It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality.
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.
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.
It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.
We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.
If the attitude doesn’t change, no amount of laws would help
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.
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.
That people think if the cops arrest you, you're no longer innocent is the way bigger issue here.
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.
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...
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.
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.