A little common sense trumps all of these other elaborate comments. Why are mugshots publicized? To intimidate people. It means the police can coerce someone i

A little common sense trumps all of these other elaborate comments. Why are mugshots publicized? To intimidate people. It means the police can coerce someone in to doing something with the threat of an arrest. The NYTimes seems to be blaming private site owners who have added a little SEO juice, whereas county and government websites usually are written so poorly as to barely be crawl-able. The police are the ones publishing these mugshots online, the other sites are just re-organizing them to be a little more Google bot friendly.