So Good, It's Bad

This multimedia effort is so successful, and yet it's so ethically questionable. The St. Petersburg Times' online staff of Tampabay.com, created a website with a computer program that searches and compiles the mugshots of everyone arrested and booked in the Tampa Bay area's four counties: Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Pasco.


The completely automated computer program searches the database of each county's sheriff's website and puts up the profiles of those arrested in the last 24 hours. The data is also broken down by gender, height, weight, age, and eye color. Crime articles and videos also populate the site.

The site says it is a public service website that helps those to search and "meet" those arrested by last name and zip code.

The Poynter Institute held an online chat with the programmer behind this site, Matt Waite. They discussed some big ethical concerns. (Scroll down to the online chat transcript.)

In the chat, the public had a concern with Google's ability to pick up these mug shots. Waite insisted that they took pains to keep Google away from this site. And also, after 60 days, the photos of these individuals would be flushed out from the site. Except, the records of one county goes back to 1995.

From a multimedia standpoint, this website is VERY successful. The individual county sheriff's sites have very old-fashioned, boring looking designs. Also, nothing is streamlined. One county's "arrests inquiry" is the same as another's "who is in jail" section.

Also, I can't help but look at the faces of these people. Waite says that only those files with mugshots get to be placed on the site.

However, from an ethical standpoint, these people are being wrongfully associated with crime in these four counties. Just because they are arrested, it does not mean they are guilty. The site states this fact in its "about us" section. However, I can't help but wonder how many people would look at these mugshots and NOT think: CRIMINAL.

Also, the statistics of gender, age, height create a visual representation: it gives the impression that these statistics are representative of ALL those arrested in the four counties. However, that is false. Some individuals with faulty mugshots or no image are NOT placed on the website.

Waite says in the Poynter chat that this project was spawned from his paper noticing that there was more online traffic on crime stories containing a mugshot.

There's a "Facebook" feel to the website. It's very visually clean and modern. However, to me, it's not a public service. To me, the site feeds on the public's curiosity and facination with the mugshots.