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I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers. If I have to go down to the county cour
by lolinder 2y ago
I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers. If I have to go down to the county courthouse to get access to the records, then there's a barrier that prevents people from casually googling someone and learning that they were arrested at one point.
If every arrest is published with both first and last name in the local newspaper, which is then archived online and fully indexed, that doesn't seem to be serving the cause of government transparency so much as the cause of sensational local news.
I also think that allowing publication of the arrest but without the full name of the alleged criminal would address concerns about government accountability while not handing a dangerous reputational weapon to the police.
- mlyle 2y ago> I'm less interested in whether arrest records are public than I am in whether they are publishable in online newspapers I think "this is 'public' information that you can't publish" is a yucky slippery slope.
- lolinder 2y agoI think that if we can't define a category like that then the next century is going to be pretty awful in a lot of ways. If "public" automatically means "accessible instantly from anywhere in the world and irreparably archived forever", then we're either going to have to have a lot of stuff pulled from the public space or we're going to have a lot of lives ruined by all kinds of "public" stuff.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWhy does it matter? There are no preordained guarantees that any specific things will be or not be in the “public space”.