Let us give corporate media the benefit of the doubt. There may be a valid reason not to broadcast or publish some police mugshots. So it is important that you read this week’s Capital Chronicle essay on the issue.
Before you do, know that the First Amendment grants the media privileges, legal and monetary, unavailable to other businesses. This Constitutional favor reflects the view that uninhibited public discourse is instrument to self-government. It exists because the Founders — and anyone with common sense — realized that the only alternative, e.g., government control over information, is far worse.
The Capital Chronicle’s exposition, under the mock interrogative headline “Do We Really Need to See Mugshots,” should somehow fit into that framework. The editors can be expected to have good reason that restricting police mugshots, that is, warning the public that specific individuals may be dangerous to the rest of us and our families, is a bad idea.
They do not. You will find only virtue-signaling by the various news editors expressing concern that showing mugshots could harm certain people. Like which certain people? Well, like black certain people. But which black certain people? Surely not those in neighborhoods terrorized by the subjects of the mugshots?
There was simply a consensus that mug shots should be sorted in some obscure socially aware way so they do not cause “unnecessary harm” — sex offenders yes, shoplifters no. But that ignores the inconvenient fact blacks are arrested more than five times as often for violent crimes, twice as often overall.
Yes, that is a tragedy. Social-justice activists have put forward dozens of explanations, none either conclusive or directly actionable. And after several generations of concerted but embarrassingly ineffectual government attention, including billions in outright cash transfers, nobody has been able to change that sad ratio. It is what it is, at least for the time being. There are going to be more black mugshots. Airbrushing them away doesn’t get us anywhere. — tcl
