Get arrested, get posted and pay

By Zoe Sullivan
Contributing Writer

You’ve been arrested, and now your mug shot is showing up in a google search. This scenario is all-too real for people in different cities around the country. Reports on sites that post these photos and then charge a fee to remove them have been published by Wired magazine and smaller publications such as Willamette Week of Portland, Oregon and the Idaho Statesman. These online mug shot sites are a logical progression from print publications such as Slammer, a weekly sold in Dur­ham, North Carolina, that features mug shots and the charge.

New Orleans has one of these mug shot scam sites, too: www.nolamugshots.com. According to an email exchange provided to The Louisiana Weekly by a reporter with Lafayette’s Independent, the owner of the site, “Barry,” actually earns no income from the fee a removal service charges to take down a photo. “While I don’t explicitly state it on the website, I remove mugshots whenever I receive a polite email,” Barry wrote to The Louisiana Weekly.

To the casual visitor, it appears that the way to remove a photo is to pay a $99 fee through a web site called www.removemymug.com. If one looks carefully at the site, on the far right side, in the lower corner there is a “Questions/Contact” link. This leads to a list of frequently asked questions, which include: “Will you remove my mug shot?” While the answer on the site is longer than Barry’s response to The Louisiana Weekly, it does state: “often, a simple polite email will go a long way.”

While nolamugshot.com earns all its income from advertising, according to Barry, other mug shot sites are associated with businesses aimed at protecting people’s online reputations. Wired magazine described companies such as remove­slander.com that will take a mug shot off a site like nolamugshots for a $399 fee. What Wired found, however, is that another mug shot site (Florida.arrests.org ) owner, Rob Wiggen, had made a deal with RemoveSlander and charged the reputation firm $9.95 for a standard removal, $19.90 for a quicker one.

The information technology office at the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office said that they had blocked nolamugshots.com several months ago, and, in fact, the most recent photos on the site generally seem to date back to August, 2011. The Sheriff’s Office, which handles processing into Orleans Parish Prison, did not respond to requests for comment about the nolamugshots.com in time for printing.

For some, especially those who have been caught in a mug shot site, the question arises about whether police departments should be making this kind of information available to the public. Yet arrest records are part of the public record. “Barry” offered these thoughts on the matter to The Independent: “as far as I can tell there is no law compelling them to put these public records online, they just have to be capable of furnishing them upon request in a timely manner.”

The Independent began its investigation of a mug shot site called “Busted in Acadiana” that allowed comments. That site’s facebook page, according to The Independent, had 45,000 fans before it was shut down last September. The Weekly also reported that the creator of that site, Christopher Hebert, had been arrested for stalking and cyberstalking.

This article was originally published in the March 26, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper