In response to complaints from Charleston community members, the Charleston Police Department has decided to not allow comments on mug shots that it uploads onto its Facebook page, Lt. Brad Oyer said. 

The mug shots, which started to be posted on May 11, 2011 in an album titled “Wall Posts,” garnered a sizeable amount of comments, likes and shares from members. 

Oyer said he does not foresee anymore conflict, now that comments are being deleted as they are posted.

“If you cut (conversations) off after a comment or two it goes away, and goes away pretty fast,” Oyer said. “People aren’t clamoring to comment; people are clamoring to converse with each other and that’s been a bulk of the comments.”

Although, he planned to disable comments, Oyer said he and the department were not aware of the restrictions put on Facebook “like pages.”

Unlike a normal Facebook profile, “like pages” are not allowed to disable comments.

Rich Zuniga, a sophomore nursing major, said he thinks uploading the pictures on Facebook is a way for the police department to communicate with community members as well as students on a forum heavily used by a wide range of people.

“It’s a good idea for people to see what’s going on and who’s done what,” Zuniga said. 

Political Science Professor Richard Wandling disagreed.

Wandling, who teaches State and Local Government, said he considers the new trend of police departments putting criminal information on social media websites a “step backward in overall social progress.”

“While I am sure that local police departments will defend such a step as enhancing their effectiveness in deterring crime and perhaps educating the citizenry on their recent law enforcement activities, the public humiliation element is a bit on the strong side here,” Wandling said in an email.

Zuniga, in contrast, said he did wonder about the potential ramifications the postings could have on the individuals finding future jobs.

Bobbi Kingery, a career adviser for Career Services, said she thinks there is nothing that can be done to stop the flow of information, which people can find while doing a quick Google search.

Kingery said employers or anyone individual information is readily available.  

“Nothing stops the police department from releasing mug shots; we see it with celebrities all the time,” Kingery said. “Personally, it’s not ideal and I certainly would not want a mug shot of me released, but it appears that nothing is stopping them legally from posting them.”

Wandling said he thinks the issue goes beyond all-around legality and into the right to be seen as innocence before proven guilty—the Sixth Amendment.

 “Such a posting by a law enforcement agency seems to chip away at the principle of presumption of innocence,” Wandling said. “The casual viewer of such a site is likely to form opinions relative to the person’s degree of guilt, simply by seeing the posting and related communications on a governmentally endorsed site.” 

Wandling said he does not think the department’s postings could impede a citizen’s right to a fair and speedy trial, but also said he thinks it is something attorneys will have to keep in mind.

“Attorneys now will have to ask questions about the exposure of potential jurors to a range of internet-based sites relevant to cases before the courts,” Wandling said.

Attorney Lonnie Lutz, of Lutz Law Office of Charleston, said he does not think the CPD’s posting would disrupt a trial, but does agree that it is something courts will have to take into consideration during court proceedings.

“That’d be something that would come up during a jury trial,” Lutz said. “If someone had seen a person with a mug shot if that would affect their being fair, impartial and so on—I don’t think it would necessarily that in and of itself would cause someone not to have a fair trial.”

Recently, other states like California and Georgia have also been dealing with how to appropriately mix investigations and the social networking website.

A California city council in Huntington Beach recently rejected a proposal that would have required the Huntington Beach Police Department to upload the mug shots of individuals repeatedly arrested for driving under the influence. 

Huntington Beach was ranked 1 out of 56 for alcohol-related automobile fatalities when compared to cities of its size with 195 deaths in 2009, according to a Jan. 18 NewsMax article. 

Oyer said the department will continue to post mug shots on its page that deemed “newsworthy.” 

Unlike Huntington Beach, the Charleston Police Department’s Facebook has people with charges ranging from the possession of cannabis to armed robbery, including an Eastern student charged with driving under the influence charge and hitting a pedestrian.

 “It has to do on the nature of the offense,” Oyer said. “The ones that are on there right now have to do with burglaries and car burglaries.”

Zuniga said he does not think one bad decision deserves to scrutinized on the Internet—a complaint also lodged by community members.

“I wouldn’t want people to comment on my mug shot,” he said. “Maybe they should (continue) just putting it in the newspaper instead.”

Oyer disagreed.

“This is the same information that we send to every other media outlet and is available to the public—we send it to the radio, television and the newspapers,” Oyer said. “A lot of police departments do this.”

Lutz said the information might be the same, but the expanse in which information travels on the Internet and therefore Facebook is different.

“Usually in a newspaper article it’s in the paper for a day and then it’s gone whereas if it’s posted on social media it’s going to be there for as long as they take it down,” he said. 

Nike Ogunbodede can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].