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: Grits for Breakfast

Weighing benefits and detriments of US public information policies about crime

A couple of recent items related to making police information public caught my eye. First, from Matt Kelley at Change.org's Criminal Justice Blog:Arrests are public information, but exactly how public should they be? Twitter is testing the limits. Every arrest in Denton, Texas, is chronicled on an unofficial twitter feed, built by an art student seeking to explore the possibilities opened by social platforms like twitter to share public information. The mugshot at left shows a woman arrested yesterday for assault causing bodily injury. She hasn't been tried or convicted. Should her photo be on twitter (or on change.org)? When Montgomery, Texas, District Attorney Brett Ligon threatened last week to post people arrested for driving under the influence on his twitter feed (he apparently hasn't started yet), some in the defense community balked at the idea of shaming people accused of crimes...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on January 08, 2010 (boomark / email).