Much discussion around Trump’s accusation has focused on Yeah The former president’s mugshot will be taken and released to the public. Such attention to a relatively routine part of criminal proceedings reflects how much Americans value the mugshot, a contemporary digital artifact that causes intense public embarrassment for most, but for Trump it could serve to further his agenda. Which often leaves other people powerless in an ecosystem of digital punishment, could actually help Trump regain control of impeachment from him.
We love mugshots. The images are symbols of the culprits in society who break the rules, irritate our voyeuristic tendencies offering a glimpse into the often opaque workings of the criminal legal system, and once released, are routinely used to generate profit through extortion and clickbait.
Mugshots are cheap to obtain through basic web scraping or Freedom of Information Act requests, but can be immensely profitable for third parties to obtain and republish them.
Several decades of digitization and the subsequent bending of transparency laws to enable the mass disclosure and immediate availability of mugshots—have created new revenue streams for the websites of newspapers that post mugshot galleriesand have even spurred an online extortion scheme in which shady websites charge mugshot subjects exorbitant fees to remove them.
Mugshots in the United States are published so frequently that they have become a data sourceused to train facial recognition software or stored in vast databases to locate potential suspects caught on camera (although this has been shown to fail miserably–with dire consequences). Mug shots are used to fill space at the local police department facebook pages to show the public exactly how well their tax dollars are being spent, and are carelessly indexed by Google image search results that people have to explain time and time again to employers, landlords, family, and friends. Investigation Dear All that local law enforcement agencies post more than 4 million mug shots per year directly to the Internet, where they are collected and republished, over and over again.
For the individual captured in the image, the consequences can be devastating and lifelong. And remember, mugshots are taken long before a conviction. They reflect only the accusation of the State. In this sense, mugshots represent another overreach of state power: the ability to brand someone guilty before they face a jury of their peers. There’s a good reason to prevent mugshots from being routinely posted on the internet, especially since they don’t give us reliable information about the person in the photo; instead, they tell us more about who the police have chosen to arrest, which is determined primarily by race, social class, and neighborhood. The permanence of a mugshot violates the presumption of innocence and can overshadow even the legal penalties associated with convictions, such as around 80 percent of arrests are for low-level incidents..
That being said, we don’t know if a mugshot of Trump will exist. New York doesn’t necessarily publish mugshots. State Law § 160.10 requires that an arrestee be fingerprinted, but does not require a mugshot. In fact, a mugshot unlikely because, as Trump’s lawyers have pointed out, he is quite a recognizable person.