7 ms·

I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but r

I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but rather that culturally we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality, though this may be by design to create space for exploitation.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago
A problem with mugshot sites is that they often detail the charges, and sometimes the charges just aren’t something people are going to be tolerant of. 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.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  If anything, that feels like an argument in favor of restricting what can be published about arrests and unproven charges in general -- not just the mugshots.
  - kolinko 5y ago
    In my country, but I think in EU in general, Police are not allowed anything besides the first name and a first letter of surname. Innocent until proven guilty. 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)
- deftnerd 5y ago
  One of the other issues that your comment shines a light on is that police often book someone under multiple charges. A safe one that the person is likely to be able to be convicted on, and multiple charges that probably don't apply to the situation. 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.
- CecilBDeMilles 5y ago
  I never thought of it this way before. These mugshot landing pages don't exactly have a lot of subtlety to the outcome about the charges.
  - HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
    I've often done a thought experiment across much of what I read in my local newspaper for people getting picked up... etc. 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.
- kumarsw 5y ago
  My sister once decided to look up if a particularly lousy co-worker had an arrest record. Turns out he was arrested on charges of domestic battery, but not convicted. Which is why he's been around her workplace so long, it's a big red flag for a hiring manager so he isn't getting a job anyplace else. Now he probably deserved to be arrested, but there's always the chance that he really is innocent, in which case the US justice system has failed him.
  - samatman 5y ago
    When it comes to domestic battery there's a lot of middle ground between guilty and innocent. 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.
- thrwhizzle 5y ago
  > but the mugshot and charges will probably be findable on the web for years and years 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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> culturally we should 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.
- errantspark 5y ago
  Absolutely agree with this, I'm not saying we shouldn't have a right to be forgotten, it seems like an easy kludge to implement right now. I'm just musing.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  The reality is that one is innocent until proven guilty. 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. That people think if the cops arrest you, you're no longer innocent is the way bigger issue here.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Perhaps the problem is that most people are left unexposed to the reality of ridiculous arrest charges. 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...
    - akomtu 5y ago
      I'm sure most males at the age of 20 can be sent to prison for dating underage girls (17.5 years old is underage). All you need is to pull them over for speeding, start an argument about something, arrest them for arguing with police, get their phone searched and find evidence in their whatsapp. Bro, in just one year we'll have 25 millions in prisons making big money for the private prison industry.
  - powersnail 5y ago
mLuby 5y ago
we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. Absolutely. And the Law is not perfect, not perfectly applied, nor unchanging. 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. Are you talking about everybody speeding, or something else?
- rhacker 5y ago
  Well in general there are 3 strike laws... I mean it seems reasonable that people that break rules 3 times need to be separated off from the people not doing that.
whatshisface 5y ago
You can change the law, but there's no plausible path towards making people less judgemental. It's like saying, "speed limits are misguided, what we really need is a culture of safe driving."
- cortesoft 5y ago
  There are plausible paths to changing behavior and morality. Prohibition was a failure, but we have had great success reducing the number of nicotine users over the years through public health campaigns.
- ksdale 5y ago
  I think something like gay rights provides a great example of hundreds of millions of people becoming drastically less judgmental over just a few decades. Of course it involves changes in the law as well, but massive cultural shifts do happen!
  - laurent92 5y ago
    We shouldn’t describe the past as extremely one thing. Because when I discovered there was a gay street and plenty of gay clubs in Berlin up to 1934, I started to entirely distrust a lot of things I had been taught about the past. The wedge got driven even further when I learnt Archimedes didn’t say Eureka, Galileo didn’t say “E pur se mueve!” to the pope (so… was he ever imprisoned? did Christians even question the round earth?) and the ILO 1930 treaty against slavery included all humans… except men. Until 1957. Which quite relativizes the narrative about women’s suffrage. It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.
    - ksdale 5y ago
      Yeah for sure, that's not to say it was always a certain way or that it's an inevitable march towards anything, just that massive shifts in culture do happen (and I think as your comment illustrates, cultures changes much faster than we think!). We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.
jsight 5y ago
Well, my issue is that these are issued on arrest because that news feed is considered newsworthy. Their later conviction or lack thereof often doesn't gather nearly as much press. 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.
kingsuper20 5y ago
>we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up 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.
tablespoon 5y ago
> I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but rather that culturally we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality, though this may be by design to create space for exploitation. 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.

Mediterraneo10 5y ago

A problem with mugshot sites is that they often detail the charges, and sometimes the charges just aren’t something people are going to be tolerant of. 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.

duskwuff 5y ago
If anything, that feels like an argument in favor of restricting what can be published about arrests and unproven charges in general -- not just the mugshots.
- kolinko 5y ago
  In my country, but I think in EU in general, Police are not allowed anything besides the first name and a first letter of surname. Innocent until proven guilty. 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)
deftnerd 5y ago
One of the other issues that your comment shines a light on is that police often book someone under multiple charges. A safe one that the person is likely to be able to be convicted on, and multiple charges that probably don't apply to the situation. 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.
CecilBDeMilles 5y ago
I never thought of it this way before. These mugshot landing pages don't exactly have a lot of subtlety to the outcome about the charges.
- HighPlainsDrftr 5y ago
  I've often done a thought experiment across much of what I read in my local newspaper for people getting picked up... etc. 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.
kumarsw 5y ago
My sister once decided to look up if a particularly lousy co-worker had an arrest record. Turns out he was arrested on charges of domestic battery, but not convicted. Which is why he's been around her workplace so long, it's a big red flag for a hiring manager so he isn't getting a job anyplace else. Now he probably deserved to be arrested, but there's always the chance that he really is innocent, in which case the US justice system has failed him.
- samatman 5y ago
  When it comes to domestic battery there's a lot of middle ground between guilty and innocent. 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.
thrwhizzle 5y ago
> but the mugshot and charges will probably be findable on the web for years and years 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.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> culturally we should 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.

errantspark 5y ago
Absolutely agree with this, I'm not saying we shouldn't have a right to be forgotten, it seems like an easy kludge to implement right now. I'm just musing.
dfxm12 5y ago
The reality is that one is innocent until proven guilty. 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. That people think if the cops arrest you, you're no longer innocent is the way bigger issue here.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Perhaps the problem is that most people are left unexposed to the reality of ridiculous arrest charges. 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...
  - akomtu 5y ago
    I'm sure most males at the age of 20 can be sent to prison for dating underage girls (17.5 years old is underage). All you need is to pull them over for speeding, start an argument about something, arrest them for arguing with police, get their phone searched and find evidence in their whatsapp. Bro, in just one year we'll have 25 millions in prisons making big money for the private prison industry.
- powersnail 5y ago

mLuby 5y ago

we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. Absolutely. And the Law is not perfect, not perfectly applied, nor unchanging. 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. Are you talking about everybody speeding, or something else?

rhacker 5y ago
Well in general there are 3 strike laws... I mean it seems reasonable that people that break rules 3 times need to be separated off from the people not doing that.

whatshisface 5y ago

You can change the law, but there's no plausible path towards making people less judgemental. It's like saying, "speed limits are misguided, what we really need is a culture of safe driving."

cortesoft 5y ago
There are plausible paths to changing behavior and morality. Prohibition was a failure, but we have had great success reducing the number of nicotine users over the years through public health campaigns.
ksdale 5y ago
I think something like gay rights provides a great example of hundreds of millions of people becoming drastically less judgmental over just a few decades. Of course it involves changes in the law as well, but massive cultural shifts do happen!
- laurent92 5y ago
  We shouldn’t describe the past as extremely one thing. Because when I discovered there was a gay street and plenty of gay clubs in Berlin up to 1934, I started to entirely distrust a lot of things I had been taught about the past. The wedge got driven even further when I learnt Archimedes didn’t say Eureka, Galileo didn’t say “E pur se mueve!” to the pope (so… was he ever imprisoned? did Christians even question the round earth?) and the ILO 1930 treaty against slavery included all humans… except men. Until 1957. Which quite relativizes the narrative about women’s suffrage. It’s dangerous to transform History into storytelling for one cause, because it makes people distrust it profoundly.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    Yeah for sure, that's not to say it was always a certain way or that it's an inevitable march towards anything, just that massive shifts in culture do happen (and I think as your comment illustrates, cultures changes much faster than we think!). We tend to think it's easier to change the law than to change how people feel, and that's not always true.

jsight 5y ago

Well, my issue is that these are issued on arrest because that news feed is considered newsworthy. Their later conviction or lack thereof often doesn't gather nearly as much press. 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.

kingsuper20 5y ago

>we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up 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.

tablespoon 5y ago

> I wonder in the discussions surrounding these sorts of things (Right to be Forgotten, etc) if the issue isn't that there should be a right to be forgotten but rather that culturally we should be far far more tolerant of people fucking up. It feels like the perception of how much the average member of society transgresses its rules is totally out of sync with reality, though this may be by design to create space for exploitation. 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.