Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

> I think most importantly, arrests need to be publicly available. We have a right to know who the cops are arresting and why

That's a good point, but on the other side there is the (very important) presumption of innocence. If I'm arrested, but not convicted of any crime (or possibly not even charged), why should that be a public record that will haunt me forever?

View on HN

Can someone more clearly explain to me how the transparency laws actually improve transparency in practice? Why would a police department, who would act in a way malicious enough to disappear people, suddenly start adhering to the requirement of publishing a mugshot of a person they want to disappear?

“Disappear” doesn’t necessarily mean “murder and hide the body”. It can also cover harassing people and completely disrupting their lives by throwing them in jail for a while for no particularly good reason and then not telling anyone until you release them (possibly having beaten or raped them in the meanwhile, and extracted promises of future regime-approved behavior).

Requiring that the police make public who they have arrested and why ensures that person’s family and friends, and especially importantly, their lawyer, can find out where they have vanished to and why, and bring it to the attention of a judge and the public immediately if the arrest was nefarious. This way if the police want to use disappearance as a harassment tactic, they have to escalate all the way to “murder and hide the body”, or they will eventually have to face justice when they finally release the person and reveal that they had been holding them the entire time in secret.

Thanks for that, I understand the argument a little more. If reducing undue harassment and disruption is the reason for publishing mugshots, and it turns out that in practice the mugshots are actually being used by others to harass and disrupt (potentially innocent) people's lives, then maybe it's worth reviewing the practice?

Where I'm from most minor criminal convictions on a persons the record are essentially wiped clean after 10 years (technically 'spent', and won't appear in normal police checks). It is illegal for people to obtain information about a spent conviction and use that information unless it is related to sexual abuse or violent crime.

Another thing, what happens to the people who don't have a lawyer or whose friends and family don't have the resources to take on the police department in the event that the police detain and abuse them? Who would they be able to call in that situation to seek justice if the same police who committed the crime are receiving the call?

It’s generally recognized (at least in the United States) that limiting the potential for abuse by the government or agents of the government is more important than limiting other forms of abuse. A person has a variety of forms of recourse against non-governmental abuse (including appealing to the government), but the only recourse against abuse by the government is violent revolution. Even when raising a formal complaint against the government, it is the government that adjudicates whether the government’s behavior was abusive. So it is essential, even if it causes other negative side effects, that the government not be able to abuse people in secret, or in ways that it can later deny occurred.

> Another thing, what happens to the people who don't have a lawyer or whose friends and family don't have the resources to take on the police department in the event that the police detain and abuse them? Who would they be able to call in that situation to seek justice if the same police who committed the crime are receiving the call?

In theory, assuming the police don’t entirely disappear someone, they will eventually be released or have to be tried in court. In either case they would then be in a position to report local police misconduct to either a regional authority like a county sheriff, or to the FBI, which has a general mandate to investigate abuses of people’s rights.

In practice, the rule of law can be thin on the ground outside of metropolitan areas. Police departments are small and tight-knit, judges are extremely friendly with the police, juries are extremely likely to rubber-stamp whatever charges local police want to happen, and police and prosecution are likely to “forget” about a wide variety of standards and public disclosure requirements.

The question is why/how is it haunting you? See my 2nd point.

If our culture treats the accused poorly, that's not the fault of nor is it caused by public mugshots.

How do you correct the problem of our culture treating the accused poorly?

If you're arrested under false pretenses (just google search "cops planting drugs" to see countless videos), how do we prevent life-long impact of innocent people?

I suppose one step we can take is to not put so much blind faith in cops. They get arrests wrong. I do think politicians, cops and the media all have a role to play though.

"we can take is to not put so much blind faith in cops."

Unfortunately, we can't just tell everyone "stop trusting arrest reports" because that just isn't how the world works.

The problem is companies will compare 2 equal candidates, but one with an arrest record. The one without the arrest will get the job.

Do you have any other ideas?

There are already laws that protect certain classes of individuals in situations like housing and employment. It's not hard to apply these laws to other classes.

Except… how do you enforce this? Afaik that's also a problem with the existing laws.

It _is_ enabled by public mugshots though. You can ban public mugshots, but you can't ban "the culture treating the accused poorly".

but you can't ban "the culture treating the accused poorly"

You can ban treating them illegally though. There's a difference between embarrassment and discrimination.

I think you actually have that backwards. You can't ban public mugshots and have a free and open society. If arrests can be secret then there is no executive or judicial oversight.

But you can make charged and convicted statuses a protected class, and ban its consideration in any context as has been done for other protected classes. After all, if we believe that the process of justice rectifies wrongs, then the matter should be closed when the process has been completed. If we do not believe that the process of justice functionally rehabilitates and fairly rectifies, such that consideration of history beyond the closure of a matter is necessary, then what exactly is the aim of that process?

We could also educate the public about the purpose of the justice system, moral complexity in the assignment of responsibility in the light of historical/social/environmental/economic factors, psychology of criminality and rehabilitation, and the frequency of successful rehabilitation and subsequent significant contribution.

Pixels aren't the problem, the behavior of dehumanization is the problem.

The way I see it, you can either pass a law "banning the pixels" or try to change human nature. Which will be easier and which one will address the issue sooner?

Either way you're ignoring human nature. The other human nature is the nature of power to corrupt, ignored in reducing the transparency of the judicial and executive processes. I can't think of a single historical or contemporary example of government secrecy which has produced morally consistent outcomes. I do not think such things can exist without eventually corrupting the process they serve.

As I said below in another thread, banning discrimination on the basis of judicial and criminal history would immediately and obviously "change human nature" because the practice of discrimination on the basis of these histories occurs openly as a best practice under standing precedent in almost every area of society.

It's literally on application forms -- how can you NOT think that requiring "the question" to be absent from the form would change the conversation about this kind of discrimination?

You can still have this information be publicly available without it being easily accessible on the internet. That's the key. I think we need to return to a system where this information is accessible on request, but not something that's easy to find online.

>If our culture treats the accused poorly, that's not the fault of nor is it caused by public mugshots.

Not sure how that works. Another person taking action between a cause and effect does not remove the cause from being responsible for the effect. For example, if I file a false police report and someone is arrested, I can't claim it isn't my fault because the police should've done a better job checking the report before arresting. The police were part of the cause, but so was my false report.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com