For more than a century, police departments and news organizations have worked together to disseminate photos of people after their arrest, often bleary-eyed and despondent, sometimes defiant and smiling.
It’s a practice as old as the mug shot itself: publicizing an unflattering close-up of a person’s face and profile, taken at one of the worst possible moments.
And in some police departments and newsrooms across the country, it may be on its way out.
William Scott, the San Francisco police chief, announced on Wednesday that his department would no longer release mug shots of people who had been arrested unless there was an immediate public safety reason to do so.
“This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Chief Scott said in a statement.
Many newsrooms have already started removing mug shot galleries, citing the same reasoning.
Last month, dozens of outlets once owned by the newspaper chain GateHouse Media said they would stop using slide shows of mug shots that were not part of a news article. Those sites are now run under the banner of Gannett, which merged last year with GateHouse and had already removed mug shot galleries from its sites, said Amalie Nash, USA Today Network vice president for local news and audience development.
“Mug shot galleries presented without context may feed into negative stereotypes and, in our editorial judgment, are of limited news value,” Gannett has stated.
Soon after, The Orlando Sentinel in Florida announced a similar change, and WRCB-TV in Chattanooga, Tenn., said it would not use booking photos unless they could help the police find a person who is dangerous or wanted by the authorities, help the public differentiate between people with a common name, or if the photos could encourage victims to come forward.
The decisions by those news organizations came after The Houston Chronicle announced in January that it would stop using the galleries, a move that drew praise from a local sheriff’s office.
“I’m hopeful that other media outlets and law enforcement agencies will follow your lead and rethink the practice of publicly shaming arrested people who haven’t been convicted of a crime,” Jason Spencer, spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, wrote on Twitter.
Keri Blakinger, a Houston-based reporter at The Marshall Project who was arrested in 2010 on charges of heroin possession and has written about her humiliation at seeing her mug shot disseminated, said the shift represented a “collective step” toward allowing people to put their pasts behind them.
“We say we are a society that believes in rehabilitation and second chances,” she said in an email. “And publishing internet mug shots — of people who aren’t convicted and haven’t even had a first chance — was always at odds with that.”
Police departments in the United States began taking photos of people they arrested in the 1850s.
The San Francisco Police Department is believed to be among the first agencies to photograph people upon arrest and keep their photos on file, according to Jennifer Tucker, a history professor at Wesleyan University.
It was not long before the images were displayed to the public in what became known as rogues’ galleries, where people could visit police stations and look at photos of people who had been arrested.
Almost immediately, the practice was criticized by police reformers and reporters who questioned the ethics of forcing someone to sit for a photograph before there had been a trial, Professor Tucker said. Critics also worried about the photos’ remaining on file even after a person had been found not guilty of a crime, she added.
Social scientists and eugenicists began using the photos to associate certain facial features with crime, Professor Tucker said.
The photographs began to feed “the false notion that it’s possible to read criminality on a person’s body,” she said.
Most of the early photos are of immigrants, Native Americans, free Black people and the poor, said Nicole R. Fleetwood, a professor of art history and American studies at Rutgers University and the author of “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
“They’re using racial categories early on,” she said. “They’re labeling someone an Irishman. You see that from the very beginning.”
Releasing the pictures let people know they would be shamed publicly if they were arrested, Professor Fleetwood said.
“It’s also teaching the public to be part of police work,” she said. “It tells them, ‘Look out for these people.’”
The mug shot system used in police departments around the world — in which a person who has been arrested is photographed face forward and in profile — was invented in the 1880s by Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer, Professor Fleetwood said.
As technology improved in the 20th century, the images were used more frequently in magazines and newspapers that before had relied on artists to engrave photos available at police stations.
Social media has made booking photos more readily available than ever, and even spawned a cottage industry of websites that obtain and publish mug shots, then charge people to have their images removed from the internet, Professor Fleetwood said.
In 2018, the San Francisco police began releasing booking photos of people who had been arrested on drug-related charges as a way to show the public they were dealing aggressively with crime, said Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University who has studied the correlation between the public’s perception of crime and images of Black people.
But those photos disproportionately represented Black and Latino people, who make up a minority of the city’s population, she said.
“If the only faces you’re seeing are of Black and Latino people, it can create this illusion that most Black and Latino people are committing the crimes,” said Professor Eberhardt, who was among the academics, reporters and criminal justice reform supporters with whom Chief Scott consulted before changing his department’s mug shot policy.
She added, “You fear the group, not the individual.”
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