> 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/

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.

If you run for political office, you can bet your opponents will mine the internet for anything they can use against you, no matter how long ago.

There was a NASCAR driver who lost his sponsorship over something his father said before he was born.

In what way? As long as it's a small enough number of people needing to be disappeared, it can be done while still publishing arrests of everyone else! It's not as if the person under detention can check.

Before the Great Lockdown, that would result in the friends, family, and coworkers of the disappeared person contacting police and then media to find them.

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 their clothes would cover the injuries, but with naked mug shots published on the Internet, they can’t do that any more.”

> I don’t see a reason why just a name would not be good enough as opposed to the mug shot itself.

Name overlap, misspellings, alternate spellings, fake names, aliases, nicknames, no names.

Let me bust out what, by this time, is an old trope: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

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 specific situation, because the court is corrupt together with cops and they will just ignore the procedures. But if I had a choice, I'd prefer a naked mugshot to torture (and of course, they can torture you without leaving any traces; with electricity, for example).

They can beat you after the mugshot.

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.

I don't think this is as easy as we would like it to be.

If they are posting mugshots online, maybe they should also be required to post all police interaction's with the public online (including bodycam footage, etc).

Or maybe none of it should be posted online, and if you are interested in it, you have to go to the courthouse and get the record.

I think the problem really is deeper than that. I think all government actions should be public within a reasonable time.

Now we have to define reasonable time. Ughh.

That’s already the case. You can file a foia request.

I'm late to the party, but PDs frequently reject FOIA requests with the justification that there is an "ongoing investigation", particularly in the case of activists (since their ongoing activism is apparently considered justification for indefinite investigation).

What about a mugshot protects you?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-man-choked-smiling-mugshot/s...

That's actually worse than either option - if the police decide to disappear you they can now claim you opted out, while if they prefer to ruin you reputation, they can subtly (or not so subtly, if they expect to get away with that) pressure you to opt in.

That would provide no protection against being disappeared, and potentially make things more dangerous for people in that situation.

Assume police do disappear people. Opting for your record to be public would show police that you're willing to cause problems for them, making the prospect of getting rid of you more appealing. Further, if some associate of yours goes to find out what has happened to you, they can just lie and say you opted for a private record and send the person away.

> Assume police do disappear people.

Then it is also easy to imagine that the same police would not take mugshots of the people they want to disappear.

Meaning if you could prove police arrested someone and they could not produce a mugshot, something is wrong. Providing them a way to deny the mugshot without being suspicious gives them more options.

Couldn't the police just take a mugshot, confirm the arrest, and say "this person was later released without charge, none of our business where they are now"?

This happens, but between most people having friends/family and high profile cases having groups outside the station, this causes problems for the police. The proposed change gives them more time without needing to deal with those problems.

* Assume police do disappear people. *

Chicago PD says hello.

No assumption needed. American police do disappear people, at least temporarily.

You can only protect people in general, not one specific person. If the police want to kill you they'll get away with it.

Still it's better to make it harder for them.

Scariest f** to even have to talk like this.

I've heard that thrown around before and... that doesn't make any sense. How would it be harder? If the police were to "disappear somebody", how would it be any more difficult to simply not release information about it? In fact, it seems like it'd be easier to "disappear" certain people, because they could claim they had nothing to do with it because they report others just fine.

This is nonsensical; if they're not following the law they will simply ... not publish the mugshots.

Besides, the police have no need to "disappear" people when they have guns and an almost impossible to challenge right to fire indiscriminately into dwellings (Breonna Taylor).

Some procedures are harder to violate without getting caught than others.

Not all cops will cooperate with the corrupt ones. And if some of them want you to disappear, they will need to hide it from the others; procedures are intended to make this harder.

This doesn't require mug shots.