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 "Those arrested should be afforded basic privacy measures to protect incriminating mugshots from being made public."
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It shouldn’t be this hard. Virginian-Pilot writer Ana Ley had tried to find out the location of streetlights in the region, in part because she noticed several dark spots during her nighttime travels around Portsmouth. My colleague covers local government and neighborhood issues in the port city. Several public meetings occur at night. Were many lights broken? Should the distribution of poles be adjusted? Are residents clamoring for them, or not? You would’ve thought Ley was trying to uncover President Donald Trump’s tax returns, given the roadblocks she had encountered since February. That’s when she began researching the story that was published this week. Representatives from utility giant Dominion Energy wouldn’t indicate the locations of individual streetlights. They suggested The Pilot contact the individual cities. Some localities didn’t keep the most updated locations of the poles or couldn’t provide easy-to-use formats to study them. Portsmouth, for example, didn’t know where its 10,000-plus lights are – though City Manager Lydia Pettis-Patton said otherwise during a public work session meeting Tuesday night, after the story ran. Norfolk provided an incomplete set of files that can’t be opened in standard mapping software. Chesapeake shared partial information from 2012. That’s not exactly new, even though many of the locations are the same.
Roger Chesley, The Virginian-Pilot
April 17, 2018, eight students at the College of William and Mary, along with a dining hall employee and visiting assistant professor, were rounded up and arrested for the distribution of various drugs. These substances included marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, steroids and cocaine. In the wake of the abrupt and shocking arrests, the College community felt left in the dark by the Williamsburg Police Department. The Student Assembly, under the leadership of Brendan Boylan ’19, sent out a formal statement via email, condemning the WPD for releasing student’s names and mugshots, and for claiming that the arrests were in response to unreported sexual assaults. “The way in which WPD handled the arrests was egregious and unacceptable, with a complete disregard for the integrity of our partnership with the City and dignity for the individuals involved,” Boylan said in the email. According to the Virginia Attorney General, police are required to release the names of an arrested suspect, as well as the mug shot if it is available. There is a long-standing debate on the ethics of releasing mug shots, and many scholars argue that such an action violates the Freedom of Information Act. The WPD may have been obligated to make this information public, but this fact bespeaks a larger issue in the American legal system: those arrested should be afforded basic privacy measures to protect incriminating mugshots from being made public.
The Flat Hat
NOTE: Virginia’s FOIA says that "adult arrestee photographs taken during the initial intake" are “required to be released" except "to avoid jeopardizing an investigation," and even then, only until the jeopardy passes.
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"Government and public-sector employees are increasingly using text messaging to communicate about official business."