San Francisco, citing racial bias, will stop releasing mug shots
“We hope this will be something that others might consider doing as well”
File photo: San Francisco Police Chief William Scott answers questions during a news conference in San Francisco. The San Francisco Police Department will stop releasing mugshots of people arrested unless they pose a threat in an effort to stop perpetuating racial stereotypes, the police chief announced Wednesday
By
Associated Press |
PUBLISHED: July 1, 2020 at 2:55 p.m. | UPDATED: July 2, 2020 at 3:28 a.m.
By Olga R. Rodriguez | Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco police will stop releasing the mug shots of people who have been arrested unless they pose a threat to the public, as part of an effort to stop perpetuating racial stereotypes, the city’s police chief announced Wednesday.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott and outside police experts said they believe the department would be the first in the nation to do so based on concerns about racial bias.
The booking photos taken by police when a person is arrested for a crime are often made public whether or not the person is prosecuted for the alleged crime. That can undermine the presumption of innocence and help perpetuate stereotypes, experts said.
“This is just one small step but we hope this will be something that others might consider doing as well,” Scott said.
Large cities like Los Angeles and New York already have policies against releasing booking photos but make exceptions. For example, the New York Police Department, the nation’s largest, releases information on arrests but doesn’t put out mug shots unless investigators believe that will prompt more witnesses to come forward or aid in finding a suspect. Georgia and New York stopped releasing booking photos in an effort to curtail websites that charge people to remove their picture and booking information.
Jack Glaser, a public policy professor at the University of California Berkeley who researches racial stereotyping and whose work Scott consulted, said data shows Black people who are arrested are more likely to have their cases dismissed by prosecutors.
“That may be just part and parcel of the same issue that police will stop and search Blacks at a lower threshold of suspicion in the first place and so, their arrests are more likely to be unsubstantiated,” Glaser said.
But the mug shots live on.
Numerous websites post the mug shots, regardless of whether anyone was convicted of a crime, then charge a fee to those who want their photo removed. The phenomenon prompted California’s attorney general to charge one of the biggest operators with extortion, money laundering and identity theft.
Scott said that contributes to Americans making an unfair association between people of color and crime. Adopting the new policy is part of an effort to stop spreading negative stereotypes of minorities, something that Scott, who is Black, said he has experienced when not in uniform.
“You walk into a department store and you get followed around and the security is looking at you suspiciously. I’ve experienced that,” Scott said.
In San Francisco, the only exceptions will be if a crime suspect poses a threat or if officers need help locating a suspect or an at-risk person, Scott said. Under the policy, the release of photos or information on a person who is arrested will also require approval from the police department’s public relations team.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said not every department that has a policy against releasing mug shots gives a reason. The San Francisco Police Department is the first he is aware of to say it is implementing the policy to stop racial bias, he said.
He said barring the publication of crime suspects’ mug shots on television shows and elsewhere should be part of any meaningful justice reform in the country.
“For a democratic society, we’re very cavalier about people’s rights and the presumption of innocence,” O’Donnell said. “We take people’s freedom away and ruin people’s reputations before anybody’s ever made a decision as to whether or not the person committed the offense.”
Nina Salarno, president of the advocacy group Crime Victims United of California, praised Scott’s effort to address racial bias but expressed concern about how the department will decide which photos to release. She said releasing booking photos can help crime victims come forward.
“The only concern for the victims side of it is how are they categorizing and who is deciding which ones should be released to the public?” Salarno asked.
San Francisco ditches most public mug shots to combat racial stereotypes: ‘SFPD is taking a stand’
By
Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Thursday, July 2, 2020
San Francisco Chief of Police William Scott touted a “groundbreaking new policy” this week of ditching public mug shots for all but imminent threats to public safety.
The decision was
announced Wednesday on the San Francisco Police Department’s website and comes amid protests, riots and calls for systemic police reform across the nation.
“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,” Mr. Scott said.
Academics from the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, in addition to Stanford University, offered guidance to the force prior to its decision.
“By implementing this groundbreaking new policy today, SFPD is taking a stand that walks the walk on implicit bias while affirming a core principle of procedural justice — that those booked on suspicion of a crime are nonetheless presumed innocent of it,” the police chief continued.
Jack Glaser, a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and author of the book, offered “kudos” for the decision.
“[They’re] on the leading edge of 21st century policing and which holds the promise of being a national model for other police departments to follow,” the professor, who also authored “Suspect Race — Causes & Consequences of Racial Profiling,” added.
View: https://twitter.com/SFPD/status/1278378436625526787?s=20&t=x4Rh-sJH9SRi0sBVw5lllg
Man charged after brutal assaults of 2 women in their 70s in SF's Tenderloin, officials say
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- An arrest has been made in the brutal assault of two women in their seventies in San Francisco's Tenderloin.
After one victim's son's search for answers went unanswered, Supervisor Matt Haney is vowing for more communication between police and victims.
Each incident happened within a week of each other, one on Sept. 15, the other on the 22, and just blocks from the Tenderloin police station.
"For something like this to happen really shocked me and I'm still kind of in denial," Says Thanh, son of the second victim, who is choosing to use only his first name.
San Francisco police arrested 34-year-old Michael Turner and charged him on suspicion of aggravated assault and elder abuse in the first incident, which involved a 78-year-old woman who was walking along Turk Street at around 7:30 in the morning.
View: https://twitter.com/DionLimTV/status/1313243904297242626?s=20&t=OzYB0vIuXcVti6CI4x0J5g
Turner was still in custody on Oct. 5 when he was charged for the Sept. 22 incident, involving Thanh's 71-year old mom. Turner was charged with battery, a probation violation and elder abuse.
According to police, Turner has a criminal court Stay Away Order for the area of Market and Jones for a prior weapons offense.
Thanh says he became frustrated after repeated calls to police asking for an update on the investigation and hoping to learn more about the suspect did not yield any response or answers.
RELATED: Milpitas mayor speaks out after Asian couple becomes targets of a racist rant
ABC7 News informed District 6 Supervisor Haney of the incident and showed him the graphic images of what happened to Thanh's mother.
"When something like this happens, they should get immediate support from the police and they should get immediate response and support from the DA and I don't think it happened in this case," said Haney after meeting with Thanh near where the incidents
happened.
Haney says he's now making a push for law enforcement to have better communication with victims of crimes like this. He condemned the violence and said he'd see to it the suspect remains in custody.
Thanh says he wants two things: for his mother, who gave up her life in Vietnam to give him and his brother a life in America, to heal. He asks Asian Americans to keep speaking out.
Why some local news outlets won’t post mugshots — and are reimagining the crime beat
Jun 15, 2021
By
Claire Wang
“My fear is that we’ll look back on this 30-year time period... and we’re going to say, ‘The news media were just as much of a problem as the police were,’” one expert said.
Soon after George Floyd’s murder last year and the ensuring protests for Black lives, the Sacramento Bee reversed a long-standing reporting practice: It ceased posting mugshots and surveillance footage of alleged crimes that overwhelmingly incriminate Black and brown men.
“We just felt like running photos feeds into stereotypes of who is committing crimes and undermines the argument of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” Ryan Lillis, the Bee’s assistant managing editor, said.
Community input has been crucial to the Bee’s new approach to covering crime. In 2019, the newsroom partnered with Sol Collective, a grassroots arts and culture organization, to
publish stories from young writers of color and identify problematic editorial habits. In addition to cutting down mugshots, the paper also drastically reduced its coverage of non-fatal crimes and stopped using racially charged words like “looting” to describe property destruction.
(There are a few exceptions to the new rule, notably for public officials and suspected serial killers. Last month, the paper ran an image of a
police officer who had been charged with filing a false report against a young Black motorist.)
“Running photos feeds into stereotypes of who is committing crimes and undermines the argument of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’”
— Ryan Lillis, Sacramento Bee
“My advice for anybody is just to listen,” he said. “Be willing to say you’re wrong and you’ll reach community leaders you’ve never reached before.”
In recent years, a growing number of local publications have begun questioning how their reliance on law enforcement for information — from identifying details of suspects to when and where crimes occur — have contributed to the hyper-criminalization and over-policing of Black and Latino communities.
And mugshot galleries, a crime story staple for more than a century, have been a flashpoint in this media reckoning on race.
There’s a strong commercial motive to publish booking photos, which have long functioned as “profit centers” that generate a torrent of traffic and remnant advertising revenue for newsrooms, Kelly McBride, chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, said.
“Local media say they cover crime because the ‘public needs this news to keep themselves safe,’” she said. “But what they actually do is cover crime in a very sensational, cheap, ‘low-hanging fruit’ kind of way.”
In the year since George Floyd’s murder, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain that publishes USA Today, put together a radical approach to overhaul its crime reporting.
“We were asking ourselves if the old ways of doing it — of covering police logs and arrest logs — are akin to mugshot galleries, in that they don’t provide a lot of context and we don’t follow through all the time,” Hollis Towns, the company’s vice president of local news initiatives, said.
Towns led a group of editors to develop a training program that, over the next month, will be rolled out across Gannett’s more than 250 newsrooms. It offers specific guidance in terms of word choice: Don’t write “officer involved shooting,” for example, when you mean “the police shot someone.” The strategy also pushes reporters to rethink their coverage of low-level property and domestic crimes that aren’t necessarily public safety issues.
“Our goal is to provide balance. We want to show up in communities when there are good things happening: when gardens are being built, when kids are being offered college scholarships.”
— Hollis Towns, Gannett
“The idea is to look at the totality of a string of burglaries, for example, rather than focus on individual businesses that were burglarized,” Towns said.
The trend of covering every criminal activity and posting a mugshot of every suspect can paint a distorted picture of a community. In Gannett’s Rochester newsroom, for example, one-third of stories are crime stories, Towns said, “but 30 percent of what’s happening there isn’t crime.”
“Our goal is to provide balance,” he said. “We want to show up in communities when there are good things happening: when gardens are being built, when kids are being offered college scholarships.”
In recent years, a host of major newsrooms have also set up protocols to alter or remove identifying details in old clips that no longer hold much news value but continue to affect people’s lives, permanently thwarting their employment and romantic prospects.
In 2018, cleveland.com implemented a
Right to be Forgotten policy that allows readers to submit requests to have their names and mugshots scrubbed from crime reports that, in many cases, never led to a conviction.
This current “revolution in crime reporting” is an exercise in empathy, said editor Chris Quinn, who put together the initiative. “I couldn’t read another note from somebody telling us we were the vehicle for their suffering,” he said.
But manually sifting through and deleting thousands of decades-old mugshots is a messy and laborious task, Quinn said, especially given that many images aren’t identified in the system as mugshots. A new partnership could streamline the process: a $200,000 grant from the Google GNI Innovation Challenge will help editors develop algorithms to identify and purge all the mugshots in the outlet’s archives.
Last month, the Poynter Institute launched a new three-month training program to help 25 newsrooms address endemic racial biases in their reporting and produce more data-driven stories that hold the police accountable for abuses of power. McBride, who’s steering the initiative, said the idea is to stem the long-term ramifications of established media practices.
“My fear is that we’ll look back on this 30-year time period,” she said, “from the beginning of the war on drugs in the 1980s until now, and we’re going to say, ‘The news media were just as much of a problem as the police were.’”
SFPD recently stopped releasing suspect mug shots in an "effort to prevent racial bias" In a 2008 analysis of strong-arm robberies, in 85% of physical assault crimes the victims were Asian & the perpetrators were African American. "Ignorance is Strength"
When the stats & data don't fit your narrative, hide them.
View: https://twitter.com/eyesonfairoaks/status/1313479365087449088?s=20&t=yCptwZjWUPZq83b08SX-Zg
