Much discussion about it Trump’s indictment focused on whether the former president would be shot and released into the public. This interest in the relatively routine part of criminal proceedings reflects how much Americans appreciate this image, a contemporary digital artifact that causes intense public shame to most but for Trump that could serve to further his agenda. What often renders other people powerless in an ecosystem of digital punishment could actually help Trump regain control of his indictment.
We love mug shots. The images are symbols of the guilty people in society who break the rules, arouse our voyeuristic tendencies by glimpsing the often obscure workings of the criminal legal system, and once released are routinely used to generate profits through extortion and click-throughs.
It’s cheap to get mug shots through basic web scraping or FOIA requests, but they can be very profitable for the third parties that export and repost them.
Several decades of digitization—and the subsequent bending of transparency laws to allow for mass disclosure and immediate availability of naked shots—created new sources of profit for newspaper sites publishing photo galleries, and even spurred an online extortion scheme in which shady sites charge exorbitant fees on subjects of mug shots for removal.
Mug footage is released in America so routinely that it has become a data source, used to train facial recognition software or kept in vast databases to locate potential suspects caught on camera (although this has proven to fail miserably). – with dire consequences). Mug shots are used to fill space on local police department Facebook pages to show the public exactly how their tax dollars are spent, and they are indexed carelessly by Google image search results that people have to explain over and over to employers, landlords, family members, and friends. Research estimates that local law enforcement agencies release more than 4 million snaps a year directly to the Internet, where they are collected and reposted over and over again.
For the individual captured in the photo, the consequences can be devastating and long-lasting. And remember, mug shots are taken long before conviction. They only reflect the accusations of the state. In this sense, mug shots represent another transgression of state power—the ability to mark someone guilty before they face a jury of their peers. There’s good reason mug shots aren’t routinely posted on the Internet, especially because they tell us no reliable information about the person in the photo; Instead, they tell us more about whom the police decided to arrest, which is mainly shaped by race, social class, and neighborhood. The continuity of a digital shot violates the presumption of innocence and can even trump legal penalties for convictions, since about 80 percent of arrests are for low-level incidents.
However, we do not know if the shot of Trump will exist or not. New York doesn’t necessarily shoot mug shots. State Code § 160.10 says that a person being arrested must be fingerprinted but does not need a snapshot. Indeed, an abstract is unlikely because, as Trump’s lawyers note, he’s a very well-known person.