We see an image. The image is a mugshot. It might show a kind of person we do not interact with regularly, or turn away from when we do. Then, when they are photographed in position, frozen in this criminal framing, we can’t look away.
I’ve been thinking about mugshots, or more accurately about whose face gets shared and why. Mugshots are an interesting concept in themselves: they were initially introduced as an effective tool to identify masters of disguise, before surveillance was ubiquitous. But what is the point of publicising a mugshot now, aside from in the rare case of alerting the public about a criminal on the run? There is no functional case to be made for sharing them besides that always spurious concept, “the public interest”.
On 6 September in Georgia, USA, a 14-year-old boy was charged with killing four people and injuring nine others in a shooting at his high school. His identity and image have been publicised; soon, he will be on trial. Seeing his face instantly made me think of what a disaster it was in 1992 in England when the 11-year-old killers of James Bulger had their identities made public: the rabid attention, and the hugely expensive relocation efforts after their release. In that case, too, “the public interest” was the justification. What, exactly, is this famous public interest, invoked as if it were undeniable and absolute? If we are not discussing an ongoing immediate danger to the public, what do we mean by this?
“The public interest”, as far as I understand it, should have something to do with helping the people, protecting their best interests, and keeping them safer or better informed. But it seems as though the concept of public interest has become extremely literal. If the public is interested, it is right that they should know. We, as individuals who are not affected directly by such crimes, are not any safer or any better informed than we would be without knowing these faces, these names. We should consider why we feel the need to look at them – as I also do.
The iconography of serial killers was a big part of my teen years. I picked up a Ted Bundy book at a cake sale aged 13, and I was off. I found every trashy book about any guy who murdered women, and I studied them all. I longed to know not only why these men wanted to kill women, but also why I wanted to know about it so badly. I thought about this for many years. I spoke about it in therapy I couldn’t really afford. Why do I pore over these strange men? Why do I feel compelled to know their motives and their methods? What deep-seated (and presumably incredibly interesting) trait does it reveal in me, that I love to read about rape and disembowelment and torture?
The conclusion I came to was this: weird and grotesque events are compelling, and everyone thinks so. It’s not unusual to gawk at tragedy – it may be one of the more universal traits we share. There’s nothing inherently evil in the desire to know more about an incident of inexplicable brutality; it’s not strange that we should want to look at a picture of a person who has committed acts of inexplicable cruelty. Given that we know this, though, about our human nature – that we wish to look at the worst things, and there is not necessarily a moral benefit to our looking – shouldn’t we anticipate it, and stop feeding this perfectly natural but not especially useful mob mentality? I thought this years ago, when I heard the mother of a murder victim declaring that she hoped her son’s killer would die in prison. Of course, we shouldn’t expect a grieving mother to have the best perspective on rehabilitation for her own child’s murderer.
We also shouldn’t release images of adolescent offenders. I say this not only because children are not the same as adults, no matter the crime they commit. But because I believe that mugshots allow us to project our prejudices and assign easy narratives to complex situations. That’s true of all mugshot publication, a practice which has historically been racialised and weaponised very intentionally. With youth perpetrators these dynamics become even more acute. The child perpetrator takes on all of society’s prejudices, and becomes the target of an even deeper hatred than their adult equivalents, partly because people find it comforting to believe that extreme violence erupts from a mysterious inner evil, one that lies hidden inside a person from a young age – instead of emerging from more explicable and depressing causes.
I first saw the image of the boy accused of the Georgia shooting on Twitter/X. Beneath the post, dozens of users confidently claimed he was transgender, others declared he was a Trump supporter. Nobody knew anything about the boy, but those inclined to foster phobias for likes or to create false narratives for fun were already feasting. I looked at the picture of this child, this barely formed person, and thought how odd it was that he should become a folk devil. All of these people were just taking in his face – not thinking about who he killed or what would happen to their families, or what would now happen to him, the child who killed them all – and projecting their anxieties about the world back on to him in a way that pleased them, or made the whole thing less ghastly to live with.
[See also: Conspiracy Britain has found new enemies]
Content from our partners
Related
