"Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff's web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person's actual criminal record. "Pick The Perp (Thanks, Steven Leckart!)
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So is this supposed to be ironic or just out right promote profiling? Either way, I'm not amused.
#2 looks hinky to me.
13% here after 50 tries.
I noticed after a while I tended to not select older women, even though a fair number of them ended up being the charged individual.
I got 100% picking out the prostitutes. Though to be fair.. it was usually 1 woman and 4 guys in the lineup.
For some reason I can't log in to place my comment under my log in name 'kit10indublin'.
I like this post - tis only meant as a fun thang. If anyone has a problem with it they should contact the website in question and not 'complain' here at BoingBoing for reporting that this website exists.
I'm sure there may have been others who have mentioned this before so hopefully, I'll add to the request -
Can links at BoingBoing open in a new window rather than through the BoingBoing site itself, please? It makes it easier to browse the linked site and then close it, if you choose to, and then keep browsing through BoingBoing. Thanks.
I've worked with thousands of offenders over the years and I still didn't do any better than chance. Nobody looks like a criminal.
This is deeply, deeply stupid. But sort of fun, I guess. You can look for clues - the domestic battery perp was tipped off by the bruises. Unless of course it's completely random.
I like Illinois's state prison reg: with each mug shot taken, you get two wallet-size prints.
Dear OXRS - I think the whole point is that profiling DOESN'T work!
I know these are public records and all, but it's a bit crass to include these people's full names in the alt text (right click a photo & you'll see what I mean). That said, I guess you could shoot for a higher score by googling the names for possible police reports and news stories...
28% success rate here. In a little less than half of my failures I'd narrowed it down to two possible and picked the wrong one. The trick I used in averaging better than random chance was considering the charge and the background of the person most likely to fit that. e.g. possession of a controlled substance is likely to be prescription abuse which means they have to look like they have access to a doctor and cash or a person with cash who might be able to provide it.
But I also picked a lot of young white women for some weird charges just to prove to myself i'm not a closet racist. just a closet idiot.
Wait, so profiling works? At just a hair above average? Crap. This has shaken my liberal foundation and stolen twenty minutes of otherwise delightfully unproductive time.
Professional profilers might be able to make it work. but maybe not with your average johnny law. I just don't know anymore.
@Oxrs, I guess profiling works when you know that all in the lineup have been arrested for something and one of them must have been arrested from the charge listed.
18/50 here, some of them are easier than others. Like looking for the beat up faces in resisting arrest and jump suits for crimes where they're likely to seize the clothes.
Kit,
I can't see any reason that you can't login. Clear your cache, clear your cookies, etc. If it still doesn't work, e-mail me and I'll work on it.
Anonymous @4, if you hold down your Control key (the ⌘ key if you're on a Mac), a link will open in a new window or tab. That way, you've got the choice of how to open the link, rather than imposing one way of opening on everyone. (Personally, I hate sites that open links in a new window, and I've installed some browser hacks to keep it from happening.)
there is obviously a race issue in the line up.
I would suspect the site to try to determine how deeply racists the guessers are.
The consensus at BB is what Avram said.
I wonder if this site is aggregating any kind of data from the guesses people make. Seems like a really cool way to run a study of racial/gender/age/etc profiling trends! Although I do feel bad for the people in the photos, especially those who turned out to be innocent.
@13 Avram: I also like being able to right-click a link, and open it however I want. (And while I'm off-topic on Boing-Boing's functionality, please make users' comment history refresh much faster? It's hard to have a conversation if you can't click back to what you posted the day before.)
I think pressing control and F5 will load a page without getting info from the cache.
I think the only good way to test this is Mythbusters style. Straight, then buzzed, then drunk. I'll report my findings tomorrow, if I remember.
It's rather depressing. Most of these people are holding back tears.
Except the murderers.
I geussed the murderer 100% of the time. Freaky.
The point of a lineup is to demonstrate that the person selecting was really a witness. Lineups aren't for picking the person who looks guilty.
Either this is a grossly misinformed sort of political statement, or somebody profiting off of other people's misfortune. Either way, it's in poor taste.
I just discovered about six months ago that clicking the center button opens a new tab in Firefox.
Is this a trick question? You can't 'manufacture' cannibis. You cultivate it.
That said, my money's on the he-she in the middle. Only because that person looks like the least likely. I suspect the others are guilty of different crimes. Weasel Boy, #1, is that guy that doesn't put everything in the bag, so you get home and find that you're one burger light.
#2 works in customer service at Sears. She won't let you exchange those gawd-awful boxers with pictures of cowboys on them because she thinks you wore them.
#3 is an indoor farmer.
#4 is a bank president, and
#5 keeps sending me e-mails about a miracle drug that will make my little winkie into Big Willie Johnson.
Am I right?
You can't 'manufacture' cannabis.
You can manufacture synthetic THC.
Dude, I think I bought life insurance from #1. He looks like an awesome dude to hang out with. Bet he drinks Schlitz.
This is utterly fucked.
Not so much that this site exists, but that the data to make it is so easily leechable from the relevant authorities.
'It's all fun" you say, and heck - these bastards are criminals, right? They don't deserve to move on, or have the potential to not be haunted by a mistake they've made at some point in their lives.
Utterly fucked.
Weird. I could generally narrow it down to two out of the five, and then consistently picked the wrong one of the two. Almost every time I narrowed it down like that, it was one of the two, mostly the one I didn't pick.
Burglary is the easiest. Pick the stupidest-looking person in the lineup, they're the burglar.
the reason why this site is lame is, /all/ the individuals pictured are perps. so it's not a matter of /whether/ the person is guilty of a crime, but /which/ particular crime this person is guilty of. which is much less enlightening.
also, the picture database is so limited, that after 5 minutes of using the site you begin to see repeats.
so, concept gets 8/10. execution gets 4/10. overall, i'd say skip it.
If you do enough of them you begin to notice a pattern in their looks. A "No Valid License" one is a "You gotta be shitting me" look, a battery/assault is almost offended and prostitutes just look like "Another work day".
-SH.
These people are not necessarily criminals. They have been charged with various violations and deserve their privacy. Many are likely innocent.
If you want to have fun checking your own bigotries, try the implicit association test at harvard
https://implicit.harvard.edu/
tried the Implicits, too transparent to be useful
I was pretty much always wrong, except for the lineups where one person is obviously stoned.
Privacy?
For the drug users, I looked at their eyes. There is a certain look to someone who's coked up or smacked up or crashing. For fleeing police, I asked myself who looks like the kind of person to face up? who looks like they would try to pull a runner. I actually tried to picture the people in the situation that would lead to the arrest. Usually, I narrowed it down to two and had an overall success rate of 28%. Profiling is shoddy at best.
Which weighs more: all the trains that pass through Grand Central Station in a year, or the trees cut down to print all U.S. currency in circulation? Here's a hint: It's a trick question.
For some reason, the "expired license" perps are almost always the best-dressed people in the lineup.
I guessed almost all the murderers by looking for the people with the deadest eyes.
On the whole, though, I did just barely better than chance--30% out of 70 guesses.
Yes, of course profiling doesn't work.
Does anyone besides me see a bit of a disconnect between the Boingers' daily outcries over the latest CCTV, data mining, photography and the law, and general privacy outrages, and the posting of this site? So it's bad for a government agency to record public sites to prevent terrorism, but a "wonderful thing" to disseminate people's mugshots?
Irony much?
33.333%
And a few of them I missed because I thought to much about it. Guess I have some sort of gift. But then again, my Mom was Paul Eckman's wife's roommate in college.
"You've correctly matched 1 perp in 1 lineup (100%) "
I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.
"You've correctly matched 2 perps in 6 lineups (33.33%)"
Jeez, ok NOW I'm going to quit.
It's pretty pointless. Apropos of nothing in particular, I found a recent picture of Susan Smith recently, and it doesn't say (to me, anyway) "drowned her two young children and then claimed that a black man kidnapped them."
Hmm, just found out that I am on this site (not this one but the one being talked about), and cannot for some reason decide to be flattered or annoyed. Should I
a) sue
b) ask for the stats on how many thought I was criminal?
I have this mugshot on my computer for showing to my friends and stuff, do not necessarily want this floating the web as I am about to apply for jobs soon.
For the record, I was arrested for a minor piss ant detail, paid the court and thought that would be it. As I am not American - but where there on a student Visa, I now have an FBI file. I kid you not.