The enduring power of mug shots
Americans love to gawk at mug shots, whether they’re of a fallen celebrity or a tattooed drug addict, said journalist Tim Stelloh. But in the digital age, these booking photos can haunt those pictured for years.
O N A COLD, rainy morning last January, Matthew Medlin hopped a freight car in downtown Portland, Ore., and headed north. When he arrived at a train yard a few miles away, he felt something he said he often feels—a kind of magnetism that he’s come to think of as a supernatural force. Medlin is 33 and, when he’s not behind bars, homeless. He has dagger-like stripes tattooed above his eyes and four dots below them—symbols of what he described as his belief in lycanthropy, the mythical transformation of humans into wolves. He’s been a habitual methamphetamine user for years. He’s schizophrenic. In Medlin’s telling, that something in the railroad yard was a person in danger. What followed, however, was not a rescue effort, but a five-hour standoff with police in which Medlin exhibited all manner of distressing behaviors, according to court documents: He tinkered with the brake system on a liquid propane car. He injected himself with methamphetamines. He pleaded with police to shoot him. He appeared to threaten them with shards of scrap metal. The confrontation, which ended when one of the officers tasered Medlin, was an unusual one that no doubt would have made local news. But Medlin’s story quickly spiraled across national and international media for a single reason: the series of mug shots he’d collected over the years proved irresistible. They portrayed a tragic, intensely visual parable. As the U.K. Sun put it, “Shocking mug shots reveal how methamphetamine and a life of crime ruined young man’s model good looks.” In the burst of coverage that followed, there were scant details about Medlin’s backstory—not who he was, where he came from, or that he denied much of what was contained in the court documents. Tiger Woods—whose eyes-at-half-mast mug went viral after he was arrested in Florida this summer for driving under the influence— can probably sympathize. But why did we see these images in the first place? The simple answer is as routine as the booking photo itself: They’re public documents. But there’s a more complicated answer, too, since the U.S., paradoxically, professes a belief in blind justice while eagerly distributing photos of its accused. It’s not that police departments in, say, England or Canada don’t collect photographs of the people they’ve arrested; they just release them only when there’s an important reason to. There’s a jailbreak, say. Or a murderer on the loose. As Eddie Townsend, spokesman for the City of London Police, put it, “It goes back to the principle of innocent until proven guilty.” This strange cultural idiosyncrasy can be traced back more than a century, to when the photograph was among the lawman’s most sophisticated criminal identification tools. But over the decades, the booking photo evolved into something quite different. Now the images are available from an expansive roster of mug shot purveyors— everyone from crime-fighting social media groups to privately run, online databases that, in some cases, have been described as extortion operations: They post booking photographs online, then charge exorbitant fees to remove them. The result is a ubiquitous, frame-by-frame reality show depicting alleged crime and justice and starring the petty thief and the celebrity cokehead, the wrongly accused killer and the mentally ill drug addict. Free expungement clinics help the more desperate among them scrub their criminal records, while firms like EraseMugShots .com offer “removal” services for a fee. Lawyers in Illinois, Florida, and beyond have taken their grievances to court, and lawmakers in more than a dozen states have tried reeling in the more pernicious practices of some mug shot entrepreneurs, Last year, a panel of federal appeals judges weighed in on the whole internet-fueled enterprise, denying a newspaper’s request for U.S. Marshals’ booking photos. “Mug shots now present an acute problem in the digital age,” wrote the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ chief judge, R. Guy Cole Jr. “These images preserve the indignity of a deprivation of liberty, often at the (literal) expense of the most vulnerable among us.” I T WASN’T ALWAYS this way. What began more than 150 years ago with “wanted” posters and rogues’ galleries had, by the last decade of the 19th century, evolved: In Paris, the records clerk turned pioneering criminologist Alphonse Bertillon developed the modern booking photograph—one frontal shot, one profile—and in the U.S., the argument for mass distribution came from one of the country’s most celebrated inspectors, the New York Police Department’s Thomas Byrnes. In Byrnes’ seminal 1886 collection of 204 images, Professional Criminals of America, he described the practice as crime prevention par excellence, a system where there weren’t just a few sets of eyes surveilling a new class of elusive criminal, but thousands. With the emergence of crime-and-celebritydriven media, the mug shot became a staple of American culture. It could distill a historic moment like the arrest of O.J. Simpson, said Jonathan Finn, a professor of communications at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society. “There are thousands and thousands of mug shots,” he said. “But O.J. is O.J.” Then the internet happened. Sheriff’s offices in large and tiny counties alike now post mug shots to slick, constantly updated websites. Under its notorious former sheriff, Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County even held a contest in which visitors voted on a mug shot of the day. Local TV affiliates offer them in slideshows, while Arrests.org lets readers tag and comment on them. Jailbase.com shuffles