Opinion: Trump’s mug shot is historic, but arrest images of ordinary people shouldn’t be published
On Thursday, like each American journalist — and lots of People interval — I waited all day for former President Trump’s mug shot.
Then my husband lastly pointed to the TV and yelled, “Blue Metal!” (the Zoolander resemblance was uncanny). As Trump’s feral scowl graced each information platform, I watched an awesome and comprehensible catharsis saturate the nation’s prime cable information networks, with commentators treating the mug shot as a victory or declaring it justice.
Now, I did expertise some satisfaction as newsrooms plastered the previous president’s mug throughout platforms whereas he faces an astonishing record of costs. Nonetheless, I’m additionally a hurt reductionist who sees a once-in-two-centuries alternative.
In the end, the mug shot — essentially the most journalistically fraught photograph format — is having the second we have to change a media conference that has all the time disproportionately harmed our nation’s most weak populations.
Trump, as an especially highly effective determine, could look like an exception to the rule. However his image is the final word case that pokes a gap within the logic that newsrooms use to defend publishing these images. It’s time for newsrooms to desert mug pictures altogether, with only a few exceptions.
For the final 15 years I’ve taught journalism at Temple College, and I run a group newsroom in Kensington, a North Philadelphia neighborhood with an intersection of our society’s most oppressed populations (it’s additionally the neighborhood that has been trotted out like a prop by GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy). I’ve seen time and again how simply these teams — together with Black and brown communities, migrants, single dad and mom, intercourse employees, the unhoused, veterans and others with excessive threat of trauma and restricted financial alternatives — are criminalized. Mug pictures feed that system.
The supposed arguments of their favor concern public security — that they alert the general public of a probably harmful particular person, verify an arrest and keep away from confusion as to which particular person (who might need the identical identify as others) was accused. However that’s not the impact they often have in actuality.
Kensington, whereas a stunningly resilient group, is overwhelmed by poverty and poor well being outcomes, and it’s engulfed by one of many nation’s largest open-air drug markets. Right here, many individuals’s life circumstances mix with their surroundings to push them into the drug market, promoting, utilizing or each. Unsurprisingly, a lot of them get arrested (significantly in the event that they belong to teams which can be over-incarcerated nationally equivalent to Black People and folks with psychological well being or substance use issues). Their mug pictures turn into fodder to splash throughout a web page. However for what achieve?
Mug pictures publicize the identification of people that haven’t but been convicted. Even when folks are discovered responsible of the crime for which they had been arrested, the general public’s want for that visible info is so minuscule that the hurt of publishing overwhelms it. It’s a lot much less doubtless {that a} mug shot will, say, forestall an arrested particular person with restricted sources from fleeing their jurisdiction than that it’s going to gas native gossip: “Hey! The neighbor’s son obtained his second DUI!”
Even so, as researchers have famous, native information retailers depend on the felony justice system’s regular stream of mug pictures to extend promoting income with minimal manufacturing. This, regardless of the stigma mug pictures create for individuals who, in contrast to Trump, aren’t public figures and are experiencing their worst moments. There’s additionally no proof that these images deter crime.
Whereas some information retailers and tasks, my startup newsroom included, have taken a agency stance in opposition to mug pictures, influential organizations stay resistant.
For instance, the Related Press, lengthy thought of the gold customary for journalistic type and ethics, has already revealed comparatively strict tips on utilizing synthetic intelligence. But the AP’s mug shot moral requirements are weak, buried below their 2021 resolution to cease publishing the names of people accused in “minor crime briefs.”
The one credible public security argument to make use of a mug shot is when an individual presents an energetic risk, equivalent to somebody on the run for a violent crime, and no different clear latest photograph is offered.
Trump’s mug shot doesn’t match that class — although it’s undoubtedly the strongest case I’ve seen for newsrooms working a reserving photograph purely for public curiosity. However even this occasion reveals how skinny the arguments for mug pictures are.
In Trump’s case, there’s definitely no different former president named Donald J. Trump, so there’s no want for {a photograph} to resolve that subject. Whereas some could desire a image as proof that Trump was truly arrested, there are different methods to confirm arrest.
Sure, I felt some schadenfreude seeing a mug shot of Trump, who has so usually thrown baseless accusations of criminality towards my metropolis and others. However is the satisfaction of a damaged felony justice system catching as much as somebody like Trump purpose sufficient to interact in a follow that’s overwhelmingly dangerous?
It’s not. Trump’s mug shot could be the definitive U.S. photograph of 2023. However let’s hope that it helps advance a wider dialog about transferring away from images that label principally strange folks as criminals earlier than they’ve even had the prospect to go although the justice system.
Jillian Bauer-Reese is an affiliate professor of journalism at Temple College and the founding father of Kensington Voice, a group hub and newsroom in North Philadelphia.
