Recap: Crime, Mugshots and Takedown Requests
News leaders Margaret Holt (The Chicago Tribune), Greg Lee Jr. (The Boston Globe), Alison Gerber (Chattanooga Times Free Press) and Chris Quinn (Cleveland.com) joined RJI fellow Deborah Dwyer to talk about editorial policies that address the long tail of digital crime reporting.
The panel discussion “Crime, Mugshots and Takedown Requests” was hosted by News Leaders Association and Reynolds Journalism Institute on April 9, 2021. Panelists discussed cultural shifts to address racism and how they're fielding an increase in requests to unpublish crime reports online.
Deborah Dwyer, a fellow with the Reynolds Journalism Institute working on tools to help newsrooms address unpublishing, moderated the discussion. She shared:
In 2020, she conducted a survey of U.S. adults, and 81% of respondents said they believe all news organizations should follow a set of standard guidelines about what information can and cannot be removed from their archives.
This conversation is important because many news organizations don’t have a transparent policy and have been unpublishing without explaining the process.
“Takedown requests” or “unpublishing” are umbrella terms for a variety of requests from people asking for something published about their past to be removed — often related to crime. But unpublishing is only one action that you might take. You can also anonymize that person’s name; update the old information; de-index/obscure it from Google search results; or add an editor’s note to existing content.
Dwyer just launched her website unpublishingthenews.com. Here you can find newsroom tools, a policy repository, an editors’ forum, Dwyner’s research and more.
Greg Lee Jr., senior assistant managing editor at The Boston Globe:
In late January, The Boston Globe announced its Fresh Start initiative. But the policy is described in very broad terms — such as “updating a story with new information and removing a story from search engine results.” It’s considered on a case-by-case basis.
The initiative will prioritize crimes one year and older, which is a short time frame compared to other policies. He says this is because people’s lives aren’t static and the world is fast moving, so they want to be able to respond quickly.
The policy also explains that The Globe will help seek court records for folks who are unable to provide their own records for proof — for example, if their charges were lowered or dismissed, or if their records were expunged. “We realize that not every news organization has the resources we do (to run) a background check, but we also recognize that it’s important work that has to be done.”
To handle requests, The Globe has a system in which they have small committees of staff members who will rotate the duties. Currently they have three committees, each with four members.
They’ll accept any kind of request and will consider each. But every request is unique and there’s no one-size-fits-all policy. There are guidelines to consider each time, but ultimately, they want to have leeway and flexibility in each case.
Alison Gerber, editor of The Chattanooga Times Free Press and NLA Board member:
Last year, The Times Free Press decided to stop publishing mugshot galleries. Before that, they took requests to remove a mugshot on a case-by-case basis. But the onus was on individuals to reach out, and the TFP found that the ones who typically requested were those with expensive defense attorneys and other resources. Gerber said they realized it was “really unfair on many levels” and decided to adopt a wider policy.
They started an unpublishing committee and have discussed pre-publication standards for crime, which are still in the works.
One new policy is they’ve decided not to report on an arrest if they don’t plan to follow it through the court system to disposition — even if it’s a sensational or newsworthy arrest.
They’re also working on standards around the types of crimes they report on, like felonies vs. misdemeanors.
Gerber said they share information on how to contact Google to get something cleared from their cache. Often the story gets removed but the photo stays around longer. She’s shared instructions that anyone can use to get images removed — and, fortunately, Google is typically responsive to these requests. Here is her explanation:
The Times Free Press has removed all the Right2Know images and shut down the site, but sometimes an image gets cached within Google. If a mugshot is still appearing on Google images when a name is searched, there is nothing we can do and you will need to contact Google and ask them to remove it. But the good news, there are several ways to do this.
Here's how to contact Google about images that are still cached in the search engine:
You can use this tool, which allows you to click on the image and just copy and paste the link into the tool. It's specifically for pages that have been removed from the web. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
Or you could contact Google here: https://www.google.com/contact/
You also could write to Google explaining the situation here:
Google LLC
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043 USA
They’re considering adding a sentence to the end of crime stories, such as: “All suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”
They have a committee of five people to review requests — five because it’s an odd number — and purposefully picked someone to join from outside the newsroom.
Margaret Holt, standards editor at The Chicago Tribune:
In February, The Tribune announced a change in how it handles police booking photos.
Holt says she prefers to think of them as “booking photos,” not mugshots, because those have the most implicit bias and “dramatically affect our commitment to be fair, balanced and equitable in our coverage.”
In the past, the default has been “because they’re available, we run them,” but it’s time to rethink that. Holt says it’s time to flip the narrative. “We need to examine it the same way we examine all journalistic decisions.” The idea that “we’ve always done it” is no longer reason enough to keep doing it.
If they do publish a booking photo, they discuss it first and consider: Is it a major crime? Does it have significant news value? Are we being purposeful and intentional in advance?
This decision flowed out of very intense diversity discussions they had with staff two years ago about how they portray people of color.
In 2015, Tribune realized that, across their newsrooms of all sizes, they had about 27 different ways of handling digital crime reporting. They decided to adopt a sunsetting policy in which police blotter items, which they publish in the interest of public safety, all disappear after 30 days.
Holt says she talks a lot with the legal department about requests to consider whether a decision could set a precedent later that could cause trouble.
They will agree to take down advertisements if requested because those were paid for and so fall outside the typical editorial space.
Chris Quinn, vice president of content for Advance Ohio:
Unpublishing doesn’t change “the first draft of history.” The information is still available; it’s just not immediately available online. And if it can lessen the harm to members of the community, then it’s the right thing to do. Quinn said they started this policy because they kept hearing about how online crime reports were ruining people’s lives.
They hadn’t previously thought about how running mugshots was perpetuating racial stereotypes. Now they’ll only run mugshots for homicides or crimes involving public officials. Also they don’t include names in stories involving minor crimes. “Those aren’t really about the who; they’re about the what.”
Their team is working with Google, who’s funding their work to proactively sweep through the archives and identify all of the stories they might want to unpublish “to get rid of the bias that we know is going to be in there because police are the source of crime news. And we know, police have long been biased.” By reporting only what the police say, they’ve been unintentionally perpetuating that bias.
He also believes there’s a bias in how black and white defendants are treated when it comes to charges and plea agreements. For example, if they decided to just remove all reporting on misdemeanors, then it might mean white defendants who got plea agreements can get their stories unpublished, but black defendants — who committed the same crimes but were treated harsher and charged with felonies — wouldn’t have their stories removed.
With funds from Google, they’re trying to find technology solutions to help scrub this content from their sites. For example, they want to remove booking photos, but they aren’t tagged that way online. So they’re working on programming that can automatically identify booking photos based on the distance between the pupils of the eyes.
Quinn said they are intentionally not tracking which stories are approved and get removed. That’s because if there was a record, then it’s possible it could at some point be reversed.
It’s hard to have a uniform policy because all cases are different. But some things can be universal, like they won’t unpublish rapes or murders or crimes involving public figures. Generally they won’t consider crimes that aren’t four years or older.
Journalism ethics weren’t developed in a couple of years. It took time and trial and error. Quinn says he’s excited to discuss unpublishing policies and considerations publicly, and hopefully together we can come up with a set of best practices for everyone to adopt. But it’s all still new, so the conversation will be ongoing.
Their policy is to try to restrict requests to mistakes, but they do get requests to take down non-crime stories. Sometimes they’ll consider taking down stories about engagements that ended or failed marriages. “It’s really crushing” if someone Googles your name and the first thing they find is news about your failed relationship.
They have a committee of editors who review requests every 4-6 weeks, and usually approve eight or nine out of 10.
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In case you missed this discussion, you can watch the full video below. You can also check out this recap posted on Cleveland.com.