Targeted by Collin County Inmates 4.0 Mugshots? Here is How to Remove.

I came across the “Collin County Inmates 4.0” Facebook Page the other day and saw how it posts mugshots and some arrest report details from Collin County, Texas (Collin County includes the cities of Frisco, McKinney, Allen, Princeton, Murphy, Melissa, Anna, Plano, Fairview, and more.) The people operating it have also set up the “CCI4point0” website along with it.

There is nothing new about people taking publicly available mugshots and arrest records and republishing them on social media and on websites. It is typically considered public information, and people are always very interested in who has been arrested.

However, there has been woefully insufficient consideration of people’s reputations from this practice. Outside of Texas, many states have enacted laws restricting who can publish or release booking photos, how they can be published, and prohibiting companies from charging fees to remove them.

Not only do the Collin County Inmates 4.0 mugshots and arrest information appear on Facebook, but listings for these posts can also appear in Google search results where people who are searching for your name may encounter them, and this can seriously hurt your reputation — it can harm your employability and can harm your current career as well as other opportunities.

If you have been affected by your mugshot appearing on the CCI4point0 Facebook page or website, read on to understand how you might be able to get this deleted or otherwise mitigated.

First of all, can they do this?!?

Yes, the mugshots, arrest records, and booking information from local police, sheriffs, and the city and county jails are public information, aside from instances when minors are arrested. So, technically, anyone may take this information and then republish it elsewhere.

We have seen this same sort of situation all over the United States.

While these social media accounts and websites will sometimes remind their visitors that “everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” the actual dynamic of these photos and arrest records is almost universally to assume the worst: If you are arrested for a particular thing, you are assumed to have done it, and people treat you as such.

Treating someone who may be violent or pose a threat to vulnerable people, such as children, as a potential ongoing threat to the public is certainly valid in some instances, but many people are arrested for other things that fall well below that threshold.

There are a number of reasons why someone’s arrest record and mugshot may not be fair or may not represent a guilty person:

• There may have been a mistake on the part of police, resulting in the arrest;
• Someone may be accused by a person with an axe to grind, and they may not truly have committed an arrestable offense;
• Someone may be arrested under suspicion of a crime, but further investigation reveals that they were not responsible or that there is insufficient evidence for them to face trial;
• Someone may have committed a crime, but they are later pled into a diversion program and will not be found guilty;
• Someone may defend themselves in a court trial and be found innocent;

In all of these instances, the continued presence of mugshots and arrest records appearing in search results or social media may be unfairly harming the person, and the negative impacts of this can go well beyond penalties they may have faced associated with the allegations.

The websites and Facebook pages or other social media that publish mugshots of many people often pretend to have admirable motives, but in a lot of instances we have come across, the people involved do not have noble motives at all. For those who set up such media online for the purpose of monetizing it, they are often seeking to profit off of the bad fortunes of others. For instance, in Texas, the highest concentration of total arrests typically occurs within young adult age brackets such as ages 20 to 24 and 25 to 30. Research shows that young people’s brains are still developing during this timeframe until about the age of 30, and they are much more prone to making poor decisions and are more likely to commit crimes. Courts frequently recognize this and allow them deferred adjudication and lesser penalties.

However, the Collin County Inmates 4.0 page even publishes mugshots and arrests of teenagers with little thought of how this can impair their ability to get into schools and employment, making it even harder for them to overcome their mistakes and improve.

While a good number of mugshot and arrest record publishers will remove crime report posts if the individuals in them later come back with proof that charges are dropped, records expunged, or that they have been found innocent at trial, even innocent people often have great difficulty in obtaining such paperwork. After one has had a defense lawyer help get deals for deferred adjudication, or when prosecutors have decided not to proceed with a case, it can be expensive to pay for further legal services to help get expungements or to obtain document proof that charges will not go forward. In such instances, the people being harmed by the arrest records are still being harmed down the road when people search for information in search engines and see the arrest information — all while the persons in the mugshots may be completely innocent.

So, without the documents proving expungement or that prosecution may never proceed, the mugshot website operators are less likely to remove the reputation-damaging media.

The Collin County Inmates 4.0 page operators have signaled that they are likely at the more predatory end of the scale in terms of their intentions. For instance, while the operator(s) have ranted about wanting “transparency” from legal authorities, they have published false names and pictures of people on their website, pretending they are staff who work on the website. They may also be doing this to obscure the website’s ownership from legal enforcement.

Their website signals that they are likely looking for those whose mugshots they have published to pay them to remove them, because they say “we offer a mugshot removal service to help protect personal privacy when appropriate.” They also offer advertisers on their website, which is another means of using other people’s names and likenesses to make a profit:

So, outside of having your charges dismissed, expunged, or found not guilty, they may suggest that you pay them for removals.

You may be thinking: Why not pay them? First of all, you probably should not reward them for defaming you. Second, there is not much guarantee that they will not publish the same material elsewhere again. You may also see them referring people to a law firm to get charges dismissed or to otherwise deal with the arrest record — something you also should not trust as there is likely a paid relationship between the Facebook page and any law firm they may mention. Finally, there are also other purveyors of mugshots, and if you are on this page you are also likely published on others as well.

It is our evaluation that the ways in which the Collin County Inmates 4.0 Facebook page and website are operating make them vulnerable to civil and criminal complaints from those harmed by the enterprise.

One question that should be obvious: Why is it called the “Collin County Inmates 4.0” page?!? That suggests that there may have been three earlier versions that are no longer present — and, why would that be? We suspect those pages could have been suspended by Facebook, or that they may have had to be removed to satisfy legal demands due to how the page owners operated. If there were earlier versions of the Facebook page, consider that the current one might also be vulnerable to getting removed on a similar basis as the earlier ones.

Other similarly mercenary mugshot promotion schemes have resulted in the operators being arrested and charged with crimes, such as when California’s Department of Justice had the operators of Mugshots.com arrested some years ago. These types of businesses can be very shady.

In the case of the Collin County Inmates 4.0 website and Facebook page, it is particularly sad and ironic that it appears likely that one of the primary owners/operators has a significant number of arrests in their own past, and has mugshots online on another predatory website. It seems that this experience may have exposed them to the idea of doing the same thing to others that they themselves have endured.

Because of the legal and logistical vulnerabilities that we have identified with CCI4point0, we have the ability to assist those who are negatively impacted by having their arrest records used by the Facebook page and its operators. Further, some of our solutions address the visibility of all mugshot websites and arrest record webpages simultaneously, which will not be the case if you pay off just one of the exploitative websites or Facebook pages.

If you need help with your Collin County mugshot, contact us to explore if our services could be of use to you.