Perusing "Albuquerque Busted - America's Top Crime Paper"

When I was in Albuquerque, I picked up the (Vol. 1) October issue of "Albuquerque Busted - America's Top Crime Paper", subtitled 'Crooks, Hookers, Wife Beaters and Druggies From Your Neighborhood'. Sounds entertaining!

Hundreds of sad-looking mug shots fill this paper - Albuquerque residents not at their best.  There are web sites that traffic in these pictures too.

I was troubled by something I saw in the paper:

The ostensible point of these sites is to give the public a quick way to glean the unsavory history of a neighbor, a potential date or anyone else. That sounds civic-minded, until you consider one way most of these sites make money: by charging a fee to remove the image. That fee can be anywhere from $30 to $400, or even higher. Pay up, in other words, and the picture is deleted, at least from the site that was paid.

To Mr. Birnbaum, and millions of other Americans now captured on one or more of these sites, this sounds like extortion. ... ” Mr. Birnbaum said. “I know what I did was wrong, and I understand the punishment,” he continued. “But these Web sites are punishing me, and because I don’t have the money it would take to get my photo off them all, there is nothing I can do about it.”

...MUG shots have been online for years, but they appear to have become the basis for businesses in 2010, thanks to Craig Robert Wiggen, who served three years in federal prison for a scheme to lift credit card numbers from diners at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Tallahassee, Fla. He was looking for another line of work, according to news articles, and started Florida.arrests.org.

...Lance C. Winchester, a lawyer in Austin who represents BustedMugshots and MugshotsOnline, both named in the lawsuit, says Mr. Ciolek’s lawsuit is a stinker because the United States Supreme Court has ruled time and again that mug shots are public records.

“I understand people think there is a dilemma presented by a Web site where you can pay to have a mug shot removed,” he said. “I understand that people don’t like to have their mug shots posted online. But it can’t be extortion as a matter of law because republishing something that has already been published is not extortion.”

And if you are a woman who fights back against an attacking stalker, your life may be ruined:

...The screams and commotion caused a neighbor to call the police. The boyfriend — whom Dr. Trimaldi did not want named for fear that he would stalk her — contended that a bleeding scratch on his chest had been inflicted by Dr. Trimaldi with the knife. (It was from one of her fingernails, she says.) She was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and battery domestic violence.

The state dropped the charges, according to a document signed by Mark A. Ober, the state attorney in Hillsborough County, Fla. A few months later, her booking photograph turned up on a Florida mug-shot Web site and with it another mug shot from a 1996 arrest on an accusation of possession of marijuana and steroids.

...She paid $30 to have the images taken down, but they soon appeared on other sites, one of which wanted $400 to pull the picture.

...“If I wasn’t a level-headed, positive person,” she wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Ciolek, the lawyer in Toledo, “I would have seriously considered ending my own life.”

So, what about "Albuquerque Busted - America's Top Crime Paper"?

Well, it's published by Pinnacle Holdings International, LLC. So, it's not based in Albuquerque, and likely isn't subject to American law.

People are labeled junkies and hoes, without having been charged for drug possession or prostitution. Apparently all you to be to end up on the 'Hoe' page is female.

I think this will be the last time I purchase this paper or look at these Websites.