San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Booking photos no longer fair game in S.F.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott decided to conduct an experiment of his own while considering whether to halt the release of suspects’ booking photos. At home he would hit the “record” button each time a crime story came on the local TV news. Replaying a month’s worth of examples validated what academic researchers and members of the community had been insisting: The pervasiveness of black and brown faces in guiltylooking poses feeds into racial stereotypes.
“It was sobering and staggering,” Scott said in an interview Friday.
But the police chief did not blame the media for the unconscious bias it created, because “we supply that information.”
His department won’t be doing so anymore.
Scott announced Wednesday that booking photos will be released only in limited circumstances, such as warning the public when a potentially dangerous suspect remains at large. Beyond that, mug shots will be released only after conviction, at the department’s discretion.
I must admit to a mixed reaction to the new policy. Scott’s concerns are well founded: The treatment of booking photos has been a subject of discussion in newsrooms long before George Floyd’s horrific killing by Minneapolis police spurred a national reckoning about the causes and pervasiveness of racial discrimination. Some news organizations, including the Gannett chain, had stopped publishing mugshot galleries of local people arrested. Publications and outlets that critique industry practices — Columbia Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher, National Public Radio — had done extensive stories on the move away from booking photos.
The Chronicle is judicious about publishing mug shots, using them less and less; weighing the news value of each against what are, by their nature, lowvalue photographs. They appear rarely on SFChronicle.com and even less frequently in the print edition. In nearly all cases, a map showing the location of a crime is far more relevant to readers who may have been witnesses or are looking for trends.
Scott noted that the overuse of mug shots is more of an issue with television news, with its dependence on visuals, than with print media.
Yet I have great pause about delegating these editorial judgments to police departments that might have an incentive to downplay or even conceal a crime. Examples could include the arrest of an elected official who has control over the department’s budget or a suspect who alleges that an officer who used excessive force during an arrest. In the latter case, a booking shot could challenge the official denial.
Scott argued that under state law the news media will have “other avenues” to obtain such evidence when a suspect experienced “great bodily injury” in an encounter with police.
His concern is not just about racial bias. It’s also about fairness. A publicly available mug shot could haunt the job prospects or future relationships of a young adult who made a stupid mistake.
The internet is filled with booking photos of celebrities who should “have the same rights as everyone else” — as in, a presumption of innocence — Scott said. In any of those cases, the charges may be dropped or the person acquitted, but the humiliating photo endures.
California actually had to pass a law in 2015 to stop what had been a cottage industry exploiting the public availability of mug shots. Some sleazy enterprises had taken to posting arrest mug shots online and then charging the subject sometimes thousands of dollars to delete it. Some of the firms were savvy enough to ensure the mug shot came up first when the subject’s name was Googled.
“It was really extortion,” said state Sen. Jerry Hill, DSan Mateo, who wrote SB1027 after hearing about the schemes. “It just seemed so unfair to me that people had to pay a price to have their pictures taken out of the system.”
Hill said in an interview Thursday that he wants to “take the profit incentive away.”
The law, signed by thenGov. Jerry Brown, makes it illegal to solicit or accept payment to “remove, correct or modify” mug shots, while giving victims the authority to sue for damages. SB1027 does not otherwise restrict public access to those photos, or publication by the news media.
San Francisco’s police chief acknowledged that “my thinking has evolved on this” from the days when he was a homicide inspector and would release mug shots after convictions. He saw it as a public benefit: showing the community that killings were being solved and potentially leading to tips about unsolved cases.
“Sometimes we don’t think about the consequences of what we do,” Scott said.
This national reckoning on race is all about reassessing the consequences of what we do.
There was a time when many news organizations reflexively repeated police descriptions of suspects on the run, even if it was as spare and unhelpful to crime fighting — but unfair to a large swath of the community — as “Black male in his 30s.” The Chronicle standard, spelled out in its stylebook, is to include race only when it is accompanied by sufficient detail “to help a reader potentially identify an individual.” Now the focus turns to mug shots. The concept and the intent of the new SFPD booking photo policy is sound — and something that responsible newsrooms already have been addressing — though I have no doubt that conflicts will arise, as they inevitably do even when it is clear that public access is guaranteed.
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron