Jail to stop posting mug shots after sites charge hundreds to take them down
The way Seth Rose sees it, USC students are being extorted.
When they’ve been arrested, said Rose, a Richland County councilman who represents downtown Columbia, their mug shots have been posted online by a handful of websites. To get them deleted, they’ve had to pay hefty fees, often hundreds of dollars.
The Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, which handles the county’s arrests, posts information about its detained inmates, including their names, charges and mug shots. Once they’re released, that information is taken down.
But it stays online on sites like mugshots.com that pull the information while it’s available, post it online and charge to take it down. Unpublisharrest.com, which is associated with mugshots.com, perhaps the most prominent such site, charges $399 to pull a mug shot.
“It’s basically extortion, and it makes me angry,” Rose said.
Reached Tuesday, a representative of the sites declined comment and hung up when questioned further. A second request for comment wasn’t returned by press time.
To stem the growth of those sites, the detention center is changing its policy, and it won’t post inmates’ mug shots online anymore, Rose said.
Jail officials made that decision Monday after they met with representatives of the county attorney’s office and Rose. Before that meeting, Rose said, the jail’s administration hadn’t heard of the websites.
Mug shots and other booking information are public records, though, and Rose said media requests for mug shots would still be granted.
Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott hadn’t heard of the sites either.
He said taking the mug shots off the Internet wouldn’t affect the work of law enforcement, and he doubted the prospect of keeping the images online deterred much crime.
But Scott said the sites should serve as a reminder to students and others that if they’re arrested, that information becomes a public record.
“A lot of the time when we make arrests and it gets in the public, people will call us and ask why we published the picture,” Scott said. “But ... that is public information.”
Rose has heard plenty of those complaints, too.
He works as a defense attorney, and lately, he’s been asking his clients if they’ve searched for themselves. The websites often appear toward the top of search engine listings.
Many other counties still post mug shots, and that includes Lexington County, so, Rose added, arrests across the river — and elsewhere — could still appear online.
“It’s probably a problem in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere,” Rose said.
Alvin S. Glenn’s director, Ronaldo Myers, wasn’t available to comment Tuesday, but Rose said Myers planned to let officials in other counties across the state know about the websites.