One of the local NPR media shows brought up this issue a while back, in regards to both mugshots and arrest records, and the embarrassment these public records can cause to people who were exonerated, or may have been guilty but turned around their lives. The show clearly came down on the side of the press to be able to publish public records, but the hosts were sympathetic to the concerns of people who wound up having their records published and available on Google for All Time.
I always thought the solution was simple - unlike the printed page, web articles don't have to be static. The publishers should allow the subjects of these articles to provide updates to the beat reports (subject to verification of course) to document the disposition of the arrest. You could imagine an article might say "June 1, 2003: Jane Doe arrested for drug positions (insert mugshot/arrest record" followed up "Update Feb 1, 2006: Jane Doe indicated that the case was dismissed, which was verified by court records. Ms. Doe has not been arrested since and documents provided by Ms. Doe (and authenticated by this publication) indicate that she graduated with honors from XX college and has been successfully employed as a mechanical engineer to positive reviews."
That may not help with the extortion racket problem with the mugshot sites, but one would hope that the media outlet websites would rank higher than the mugshot sites on search engines.
The thing I don't understand is why the mugshots are being published in the first place in the US. Like it or not, the internet is a permanent record so that mugshot of you at your worst time (but not convicted of anything), will be out there forever in some capacity if it gets published.
A little common sense trumps all of these other elaborate comments.
Why are mugshots publicized? To intimidate people. It means the police can coerce someone in to doing something with the threat of an arrest.
The NYTimes seems to be blaming private site owners who have added a little SEO juice, whereas county and government websites usually are written so poorly as to barely be crawl-able. The police are the ones publishing these mugshots online, the other sites are just re-organizing them to be a little more Google bot friendly.
I always thought the solution was simple - unlike the printed page, web articles don't have to be static. The publishers should allow the subjects of these articles to provide updates to the beat reports (subject to verification of course) to document the disposition of the arrest. You could imagine an article might say "June 1, 2003: Jane Doe arrested for drug positions (insert mugshot/arrest record" followed up "Update Feb 1, 2006: Jane Doe indicated that the case was dismissed, which was verified by court records. Ms. Doe has not been arrested since and documents provided by Ms. Doe (and authenticated by this publication) indicate that she graduated with honors from XX college and has been successfully employed as a mechanical engineer to positive reviews."
That may not help with the extortion racket problem with the mugshot sites, but one would hope that the media outlet websites would rank higher than the mugshot sites on search engines.