Wake County to take 400,000 mug shots offline this month

NC expungement law clears charges, but mug shots persist online

Wake County, N.C., plans to shut down its online portal containing about 400,000 booking photos spanning two decades, the latest move in a national push to limit the visibility of arrest photos online. Once the website goes dark, likely this month, public access will be limited to a pair of in-person kiosks in Raleigh and to the statewide court-records database.

The county’s Bureau of Forensic Services said the change is a practical step. North Carolina’s Second Chance Act, passed in 2020, automatically expunges charges that don’t lead to a conviction, but those erasures aren’t reaching the county’s website. As a result, booking photos of many people whose charges were cleared by the law remain visible.

“We don’t want to be putting inaccurate information out there,” said Sam Pennica, director of the county’s Bureau of Forensic Services. The challenge, he said, is how to satisfy public-records requirements without mug shots spreading online “for anybody and everybody to see.”

Wake County is North Carolina’s most populous county, with about 1.3 million residents. Statewide, 1.38 million cases were automatically expunged during the 2024-25 fiscal year, the most recent data available. The state’s Administrative Office of the Courts sends a daily extract of expunged cases to a data analytics center for use by the State Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, but that center lacks authority to share updates with Wake County, a state Department of Information Technology spokesman said.

Supporters of the county’s decision said the new limits would avoid saddling arrestees with a digital scarlet letter that can cause lasting harm in employment and housing even after an acquittal or dismissal. “There’s no more casualness to it,” said Dennis Gaddy, who lobbied for the Second Chance Act before its 2020 passage. “You have to work a little bit harder to get to the records.” Laura Webb, a project director at the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center, said the change undermines the intent of the law if, after an expungement, someone can still see a mug shot in a Google search.

Transparency advocates and journalists said the move makes public records harder to obtain. “I don’t think the solution is to make others’ access to them more difficult,” said Mike Tadych, general counsel for the North Carolina Press Association. Pate McMichael, director of the nonprofit North Carolina Open Government Coalition, which includes journalists, lawyers, librarians and academics, said: “If government is out there arresting people, taking pictures of them, we should be able to access that.” McMichael described the change as part of a broader push in North Carolina to make records harder to get.

Wake County booking photos have already spread beyond the county’s website to local Facebook pages that catalog them with names, ages, arrest dates and charges. A local Facebook page shows Wake County mug shots in that format. Commenters regularly mock arrestees. One recent post, which showed a 40-year-old man accused of providing armed security without proper registration, drew more than 100 comments, most making fun of his wandering right eye. The page sometimes links photos to a website that lets people rank mug shots and tag them as “funny,” “spooky” and “hot.”

Katheryn Zughbi of Rocky Mount, N.C., who runs a separate Facebook page called Fighting Crime News and Who’s Wanted, said she won’t drive 45 minutes to Raleigh after the portal goes offline, meaning some stories she posts about the county probably won’t have photos. “I feel like it’s giving the criminals more rights than the people,” she said. When she wrote about the change, the response was mixed. One commenter wrote: “If you don’t want your mugshot posted, don’t do any crime to get arrested.” Another argued the photos are usually shared “to entertain,” not to protect the public.

“Depending on the jurisdiction in which you’re arrested, that dictates whether or not this photo is going to follow you around for the rest of your life,” said Sarah Lageson, an associate professor at Northeastern University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and School of Law.

Wake County’s plan follows passage of laws in red and blue states since 2020 curbing the release of mug shots. In 2021, the GOP-led Utah legislature passed a law that generally bars law-enforcement agencies from releasing mug shots without a conviction. The bill’s Republican sponsors said once a mug shot spreads online, it creates a cloud of guilt.

Since 2023, law-enforcement agencies in West Virginia typically can’t post to social media mug shots of people charged with minor offenses. The law’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Ryan Weld, said he was motivated by the suicide of a young man who became distraught when he saw his booking photo on Facebook after he fought with his parents and was arrested. “When someone has been arrested, you’re generally catching them at a pretty low point,” Weld said. There is no need for the “public shame and embarrassment” of posting their mug shot, he added.

California lawmakers have imposed social-media restrictions on law enforcement, and booking photos in New York state can’t be released without a specific law-enforcement purpose. Louisiana passed a strict mug shot law in 2022 involving nonviolent charges, but largely repealed it when some sheriffs called it unworkable. A ban remains on websites charging people a fee to remove mug shots. State Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat who sponsored the initial bill, said bulk dissemination of mug shots doesn’t improve safety. He lamented “the salaciousness, the shame, the embarrassment, the clicks, the likes” that often come from sharing the photos online.

Last year, a Republican state senator in North Carolina sponsored a bill that would bar police from releasing mug shots except in missing-persons cases or when a court found it necessary for “immediate law enforcement needs.” The bill stalled.

Mug shots date to the early days of photography. In 1854, San Francisco police began making daguerreotypes of criminals, followed by counterparts in New York City and elsewhere, according to researchers. So-called rogues galleries allowed the public to gawk at the images.