ATLANTA — Four words added to legislation that targets mugshot mills have free speech advocates worried the public could lose access to videos that hold police accountable for their conduct.
Legislation that started in Georgia’s Senate as a solution to the reputational harm caused when booking photographs circulate online after charges are dismissed has evolved into a much broader measure.
Senate Bill 482, supported by sheriffs across Georgia, pits personal privacy of the accused against the public’s right to examine government use of force.
Blake Feldman, senior policy counsel with the Southern Center for Human Rights, said it raises a red flag when “a law enforcement agency that wields incredible authority to stop and detain people and discharge firearms at people” seeks to withhold footage from body-worn cameras.
He and advocates for free speech and for newsgathering operations, including broadcasters and the newspaper industry, argued that the requirements would pose a barrier to such access.
The legislation started as a requirement for anyone who wants a mugshot to obtain it in person, with a notarized statement that they would comply with existing law intended to protect people in those images.
In 2013, Georgia made it illegal for websites that publish mugshots to make subjects who were not convicted pay to take their picture down.
But that law did not solve the problem, so the next year Rep. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, pushed through a law requiring operators to promise in writing that they would abide by the takedown requirements.
That still didn’t fix the problem.
So, this year Strickland, now a state senator, introduced SB 482, intending to make it harder to get mugshots in the first place.
Along the way, he added the four words to his bill that have the free speech advocates concerned: “or law enforcement video.”
Not only would news organizations have to drive across the state to get an official copy of a police video from a far-flung community, but they arguably could be forced to identify everyone in the video they are seeking, said Sarah Brewerton-Palmer, a lawyer with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
“In order to get this footage, you have to name everybody who’s in it,” she said. But there could be bystanders in a video of an altercation between police and a suspect, she said, “and before you see it, you don’t know who those people are.”
Brewerton-Palmer said bodycam videos of a shooting by police during a protest would effectively become exempt from the state open records act.
She and others are less concerned about the proposed restrictions on releasing mugshots because of the way their enduring presence online has upended the lives of innocent people.
At a Feb. 18 Senate committee hearing on Strickland’s bill, a representative from the Georgia Justice Project, which helps people reintegrate into their communities after tangling with the criminal justice system, said it remains a common issue among their clients.
It was at that hearing where videos entered the conversation.
(The Georgia Press Association was among the news organizations that raised concerns. Capitol Beat is a project of the association.)
Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman, president of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, told senators on the committee that his colleagues across the state complain about bulk requests for mugshots and videos that are then exploited for profit.
Ashley Henson, the sheriff in Paulding County, said the accused who have their cases dismissed go on to get “destroyed” on social media. He said that when he tried to intervene to ask for removal of material, the publishing organization did not respond.
“Monetization of someone else’s misery is not right,” Henson said. “We are not here to give these YouTubers content.”
Strickland said in an interview that he was moved to action against mugshot mills by a teacher who noticed her students passing around her booking picture of her. The charges against her had been dropped, so she had contacted the publisher and paid to take it down, he said. But then the photo popped up on another site.
Strickland described it as a “whack-a-mole” problem.
Publishers were not honoring the takedown requests they had submitted in writing per the 2014 law. And even when they did, out-of-state or even international actors beyond the reach of Georgia law enforcement were republishing them.
“Once the image is there, it’s there forever,” he said.
So, now he is proposing to restrict supply by forcing those who want mugshots — and police videos — to request them in person. Requiring requesters to identify the subjects in those images would cut down on the number of bulk requests, which tend to be by profiteers, he said.
At that February committee hearing, he agreed with another senator who said the public could still obtain pictures and videos, they just had to “go through the legwork” to get them.
The committee passed SB 482 unanimously, sending it to the Senate floor, where it also passed unanimously on March 6, and now awaits hearings in the House.
The Senate floor vote occurred on “crossover” day, the deadline to move bills from the Senate to the House and vice versa. It is an exceptionally rushed time during any legislative session, when mountains of legislation are getting votes, giving lawmakers little time to read the language.
Democrats backed the measure without question, except for one raised about an unrelated part of the bill. That might have been due to the backing by Democrats. They had voted it out of committee, and two had co-signed it back when Strickland had introduced it — before he added those four words about videos.
Reached by phone, one of those two co-sponsors, Sen. Kenya Wicks, D-Fayette, said she was unaware of the new language.
“I don’t think I can comment because there are a lot of amendments to this bill,” said Wicks, who voted for SB 482 with the other Democrats when it reached the full Senate.
Strickland said he is willing to work with advocates to address their concerns, perhaps by changing his bill to require that those seeking a video must identify only the officer who took it or the time and location where it was shot.
But it is unclear whether a compromise can be reached, at least on the video language.
Brewerton-Palmer said she sympathized with Strickland’s concerns. The internet and, now artificial intelligence, have stripped away privacy, she said.
But the public’s right to know outweighs that harm, she said. “There needs to be a thumb on the scales in favor of access.”
Feldman said his organization supports the new restrictions that Strickland wants to impose for access to mugshots, but he said applying those same obstacles to the release of law enforcement videos would be an indirect way to erode the state open records law, something his organization opposes because of the erosion of transparency around police encounters with the public.
