The article is here; here is the Introduction and the start of Part I:
In the spring of 2022, visitors to the Smoking Gun website would find a challenging "game, where [one's] wasted time [was] well spent."
"For today's 'Friday Photo Fun,'" the website explained, "readers must examine five mug shots and match up the respective defendants with the crime for which they were arrested." There appeared five photos of sorry-looking individuals arrested for crimes both serious and not so much. A tattooed white man nabbed by police for narcotics possession; a Black woman arrested for speeding; three other individuals arrested for driving while intoxicated, assault and battery, and grand theft respectively. The match-the-mugshot-to-the-crime game appeared every Friday.
The Smoking Gun gathered those police booking photos through freedom-of-information laws, statutes designed to give the public access to important governmental information. For a long time in the United States, mug shots have been a part of such governmental openness: The thought was that the public should know who'd been arrested and on what grounds, and how they'd looked at the time of arrest in order to ensure that police had not battered them. Mug shots also helped to avoid mistaken identity, access proponents said. In the past, it was mainly journalists who were those proponents, who would receive the images from police and later assess them for newsworthiness, publishing only those they thought relevant for public view.
