CAdvocates across the country have long fought to get people cleared of criminal records, running campaigns to expunge old cases and make past arrests private when people apply for jobs and housing. .
This effort is critical because more than 70 million Americans have a criminal record or arrest record, or approximately one in three adults. However, these policies do not address old media reporting, which is one of the most harmful ways that past conflicts with police can derail people’s lives.
Some news organizations are working to fill that gap.
In recent years, a handful of local newspapers across the country have launched programs to review their archives and consider requests to remove names or remove old articles in an effort to protect the privacy of subjects involved in misdemeanor crimes.
“In the olden days, when you put a story in a newspaper, it disappeared into your memory pretty quickly, if not instantly,” says Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com and Plain Dealer newspapers. “But because of the power of us (search engines), what we write about someone now will always be front and center.”
Quinn pioneered the “Right to be Forgotten” experiment in 2018, which was motivated by numerous inquiries from test subjects describing the harms of past crime reporting and asking for it to be removed. “People will say, ‘Your story is ruining my life.’ I made a mistake, but…my life has changed.”
Retracting or altering old stories has long been considered taboo in the media, especially when there are no concerns about accuracy. But Quinn said he feels an ethical obligation to reconsider those norms. “I couldn’t take it anymore…I was tired of saying no to people and sticking to tradition without being thoughtful.”
He recalled an early incident in which a drunken teenager damaged part of a cemetery monument and was charged. After a few years, he “fully made amends” and began applying for jobs, Quinn said. “He did something stupid as a kid…and he said, ‘I can’t move on.'” The editor granted his request, removed his name, and created a similar I presented it to my colleagues as a model case.
Although there was some initial internal resistance, Quinn and his staff eventually came up with a general condition: Names would not be removed in cases of violence, sexual crimes, crimes against children, and corruption. Because police officers are treated as public servants, stories of wrongdoing will remain. The case generally has to be at least four years old, although the newspaper makes exceptions. Quinn didn’t want to set hard and fast rules because each case is different. The guiding question, he said, was: “What’s more valuable: this story remaining available to the public or this person being able to move on?”
You have this idea in your mind that one Google (search) and everything will be stripped away.
Thorne Huff, Californians for Safety and Justice Partnership Director
The concept then spread to the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Maine’s Bangor Daily News, the Oregonian, and New Jersey’s NJ.com. The effort gained momentum after the 2020 racial justice protests prompted news organizations across the country to reflect on the media’s legacy of biased and harmful reporting, including the widespread use of mugshots. did.
Quinn dramatically scaled up his work after funding from Google enabled his newsroom to develop tools to proactively identify stories that might be worth removing. did. The process was arduous, but it resulted in thousands of deletions, not only informing our readers of the effort, but also making the program more fair.
The Portland-based Oregonian used to have regional reporters stationed in bureaus in surrounding suburbs to cover hyperlocal news, including the smallest crimes, said Therese Bottomley, the newspaper’s executive editor. . “Is it really something that should bother someone for years?” she asked. Recognizing that these are minor crimes that the paper no longer covers, she formally launched the clean slate program in 2021, establishing an internal committee to review requests.
The Oregonian offers several options. Mugshot allows you to remove your face photo, a move that comes after Oregon recognized the serious harm of booking photos and changed its law to limit the publication of booking photos. Papers can also remove the name of the subject, delete the article entirely, or ask Google to de-index the article. That means the article will still be on OregonLive.com, but it will no longer easily appear in web searches. The committee fact-checks claimants’ claims to ensure they meet the court’s requirements and remain clean.
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Each case is carefully considered. Educator who brought misdemeanor harassment case removed requested removal, but The Oregonian maintains story as additional reporting suggests he has avoided sexual misconduct allegations for years I have decided that. The commission removed articles about a man jailed for car theft and a woman arrested for illegal drugs.
In November, Mr Bottomley published excerpts from one subject’s heartfelt plea to remove an article about a non-violent conviction when he “hit rock bottom” in the throes of addiction. He talked about his long rehabilitation journey and the family he is currently raising.
“I am now proud to say that my life is indistinguishable from what was written about in the Oregon Live article,” he wrote. “I live in fear that one search for my name on Google will ruin everything I worked so hard to build.” His 10 years. The previous article was recently deleted. In total, The Oregonian approved 56 applications, with 11 partially approved (including deindexing but not removal) and 29 denied, Bottomley said.
Bottomley noted that the vast majority of people in state prisons will eventually be released. “These people will someday become our neighbors, our co-workers, and hopefully contributing members of society. Now, we should at least consider the really trivial, re-entry of someone in the past who has paid off a debt. Should we think of ways to avoid creating unnecessary barriers?”
Editors say the program has caused news organizations to be more cautious in their current reporting, omitting names when they are not relevant and thinking more carefully about the impact of photographs in crime stories. are.
Thorne Huff, director of the California Partnership for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that fights against mass expungements, said reporters only captured law enforcement’s one-sided story about the arrest and did not follow up on it. He said he often neglects it. He said people jailed for drug trafficking could end up being convicted of possession, and women arrested for prostitution could later be identified as survivors of sex trafficking. . Although it can take years for a case to be adjudicated, news coverage based on the initial arrest may provide a narrative of a person’s life.
“It creates this constant sense of anxiety that a lot of people live with,” Hough said, adding that crime novels generally lack context about the trauma and struggles of the characters that led to the incident. pointed out. “People wake up every day and pray that they don’t have to talk about what was written in the paper about their arrest and that they don’t have to relive it. There’s just one more Google ( The idea is that if you do a search, everything will be taken away from you.”
