警用大頭照殃及無辜----中壢英文補習班－金學堂英語的部落格

【聯合報／By DAVID SEGAL／馮克芸譯】

Police Mug Shots Can Haunt the Innocent

On a terrifying night in July 2011, Dr. Janese Trimaldi, a physician in Florida, locked herself in her bedroom to hide from a drunken boyfriend. He went into the kitchen, retrieved a knife and jimmied open the door.

She said he was more than double her size. “So when he got in,” Dr. Trimaldi said, “he lifted me by my arms, the way you lift a child, and threw me six feet backward.”

A neighbor called the police. The boyfriend contended a scratch on his chest had been inflicted by Dr. Trimaldi with the knife. She was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The state dropped the charges, but a few months later, her arrest photograph turned up on a Florida mug-shot website and with it another mug shot from a 1996 arrest on an accusation of possession of marijuana and steroids. Records show that she was not prosecuted for either charge.

She paid $30 to have the images taken down from the site, but they appeared on others , one of which wanted $400 to pull the picture.

“I’ve read accounts of people paying and not having the photos removed,” Dr. Trimaldi, 40, said. “Or they pay and appear on other sites.” It’s all a scheme, she added.

She is now gearing up for a job search and worries that two photographs could wreck years of hard work to practice medicine.

To Dr. Trimaldi and millions of other people now captured on these sites, this sounds like extortion.

The sites are legal in the United States. Some states are looking for ways to curb them.

But legislators are finding plenty of resistance, much of it from journalists who assert that public records should be just that: public.

Today there are more than 80 mug-shot sites in the United States. They get most of their images from police websites, where policies about whose mug shot is posted and for how long can vary from state to state.

JustMugshots, started in 2012 by Arthur D’Antonio III, 25, now has five employees, two of whom spend all their time dredging up images from 300 sources. The site has nearly 16.8 million such photos, Mr. D’Antonio said. He would not discuss profit, except to say, “We’re seeing some growth.”

JustMugshots has a “courtesy removal service,” allowing people who have been exonerated, or never charged, to get their image taken down free. Mr. D’Antonio declined to say how many people had been granted deletions.

People eager to vanish from mug-shot sites can try a mugshot removal service, a miniindustry that has sprung up in the last two years and is nearly as opaque as the one it is intended to counter. “I’m not going to go into what we do,” said Tyronne Jacques, founder of RemoveSlander. com. “Whatever works.” Removal services aren’t cheap —

RemoveMyMug.com charges $899 for its “multiple mug shot package” — and owners of large reputation-management companies contend that they are a waste of money.

“Their business model is to find someone willing to pay to take down their image, which marks them as a target who is willing to pay more,” says Mike Zammuto, president of the reputation company Brand.com.

Mug shots seem to attract big online crowds. Google’s results are supposed to reflect both relevance and popularity, and mug-shot sites appear to rank exceptionally well , according to Doug Pierce, founder of Cogney, a search engine optimization company in Hong Kong.

“When others search your name, that link to Mugshots.com is way more attention-grabbing than your LinkedIn profile,” Mr. Pierce said.

He added: “Once they click, they stare in disbelief, and look around a bit, which means they stay on the page, rather than returning immediately to the search results. Google takes that as a sign that the site is relevant, and that boosts it even more.”

中譯

2011年七月一個恐怖的夜晚，美國佛羅里達州女醫師賈妮絲．崔馬迪為躲酒醉男友，把自己關在臥室中。男友進廚房抄了一把刀，撬開她的房門。

崔馬迪說，男友塊頭比她大上不止一倍，「他闖進臥室，抓著我的雙臂，像拎小孩那樣提起，摔到1.8公尺外。」鄰居報了警，男友堅稱他胸膛上的擦傷是崔馬迪拿那把刀劃的，她被控以持致命武器加重攻擊罪名。

後來佛州撤銷了指控，但幾個月後，佛州一個大頭照網站出現了她被捕時的大頭照，以及一張1996年她被控持有大麻及類固醇而被捕時的照片。紀錄顯示兩案她都未被起訴。

她付給那個網站30美元，移除了她的兩張大頭照，但那些照片還出現在其他網站，其中一個網站對於移除大頭照索價400美元。

40歲的崔馬迪說：「我看過報導提到，有人付了錢大頭照並沒移除，或是付了錢照片卻出現在別的網站。」她還說，這全是詭計。

崔馬迪在積極準備找工作，她擔心那兩張大頭照會破壞她行醫多年的辛勤努力。

對崔馬迪和大頭照出現在這類網站的數百萬人來說，這聽來像敲詐。

這種網站在美國是合法的，有些州正在設法加以節制。但許多議員發現阻力不小，頗大部分來自新聞工作者，他們聲稱公共紀錄就該維持公開。

目前全美有80多個警用大頭照網站，照片多數取自警局網站，至於哪些大頭照要貼出來、貼多久，各州政策不一。

「JustMugshots」網站2012年由25歲的丹托尼奧創設，現有員工五人，其中二人以全部工作時間從300個資料來源收集照片。丹托尼奧說，JustMugshots現有近1680萬張大頭照，他不談獲利，只說：「我們的業績有些成長。」

JustMugshots有「免費移除服務」，免費移除無罪開釋或未被移送者的大頭照。丹托尼奧拒絕說明移除了多少張。