On the internet, your mugshots can stay online indefinitely if action to remove them is not taken. Even if your records are sealed or expunged, your mugshot can still appear online and persist there if you take no action to remove the image from the internet.
Getting Arrested
The best way to keep an unwanted mugshot off the internet would be to avoid getting arrested. Unfortunately, most of the people visiting our website have had some type of interaction with law enforcement. Sometimes we can’t help but be in the wrong place at the wrong time or perhaps we get mixed up in the wrong crowd. Or we visit an establishment in an unknown area with a heavy police presence designed to borderline entrap individuals. We can be mistakenly identified as someone else who is wanted by the local Sheriff’s office. Perhaps you get into a relationship with an abusive partner and end up defending yourself from them.
If you’re lucky you will get the charges dropped or dismissed in short order. in other instances, you may have to retain a lawyer to get the justice you deserve. If that is the case you may have some luck with contacting the various websites and asking them to remove your mugshot. They may request court documentation to prove or verify that your charges were indeed dropped or dismissed. A lot of times this can be a hassle as well. Then you can avoid the frustration and run around of getting this handled.
Mugshot Avoidance
On the other hand, if you have a warrant for your arrest for something like a failure to appear it may be possible to turn yourself in and avoid having your mugshot on the internet. All of the mugshot websites use software to scrape county sheriff websites. They usually only scrape websites of the counties that process a larger number of inmates. That being said if you decide to turn yourself in at a smaller municipality or county in other words somewhere in the sticks chances are you may not have your mugshot placed on the internet in the first place. For example, if you live in Florida. Sumter County is not listed on Arrests.org‘s website. There is one downside to doing this, you will have to spend more time in jail waiting for transport to the county you have a warrant in. There are no guarantees but it is worth a shot at avoiding the embarrassment and risk associated with having your mugshot on the internet. It is common practice for mugshot websites to scrape images from sheriff’s websites for arrest records that they can then post online. Smaller governments and law enforcement agencies book smaller amounts of people making it more likely that the mugshot publishers will skip over these counties.
Reputation Protection
Some Sheriff municipalities like the Pinellas County Sheriff place mugshots behind a login so that they can not be scraped by bots. People who have a legitimate need or physically come into the office may get access to the mugshot. This allows a perfect balance between the freedom of information laws in Florida and the right to privacy. There may be other municipalities that have similar protections for people who get arrested in their jurisdiction. Generally, legitimate law enforcement agencies employ a data retention policy that balances the need to know by the community they serve with a right to privacy of the individual arrested. This results in the image getting deleted somewhere between 30 – 90 days after an inmate has been released and is no longer in custody.
The best way to prevent unknown or potentially negative results from appearing in a search online for your name is to monitor your reputation.
Alex Adekola is a proven thought leader in the reputation management industry who has targeted mugshot publishers since 2012. He is the longest-serving reputation and crisis management strategist and has written extensively on crisis management. He is the creator and director of strategy at Incept Technologies.