mugshot

New York City has agreed to pay $17.5 million to thousands of women who say their religious rights were violated when police forced them to remove their hijabs for mugshots.

A never-before-seen mug shot of rapper Tupac Shakur is expected to be sold for $35,000.

The FBI has released an updated simulation photo of Leo Frederick Burt over 50 years since a bomb killed a researcher on the University of Wisconsin campus.

After Donald Trump had his momentous mug shot photo taken yesterday, a photographer has criticized the quality of booking photos coming out of Fulton County Jail.

It is expected that former President Donald Trump will have his mugshot taken in Georgia before the end of next week.

Two developers have created artificial intelligence (AI) software that generates photorealistic police sketches using DALL-E.

United States Marshals have released age-progressed images of three men who infamously escaped the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island in 1962.

Thousands of hacked Chinese police photographs of interned Uyghurs have shed light on Beijing's treatment of its Muslim minority in Xinjiang.

Police departments aren't often accused of unethical Photoshop manipulation, but that's the controversy that has erupted in Portland, Oregon. The police were discovered to have Photoshopped a suspects mugshot to make his face look more like the perpetrator in a bank robbery.

In 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act made it a legal requirement that anybody who was arrested in England and Wales had to have their photograph taken—thus was born the official "mug shot". But mug shots from the late 1800s look very different from the ones you might see today.

If you're a fan of the late musician David Bowie, there's a good chance you've seen these police portraits before. Often referred to as one of the best celebrity mugshots, the photos are mistakenly believed to be staged promotional photos. But they're not: they are official mugshots taken after Bowie was arrested for marijuana possession back in 1976.

The history of the photos is also rather interesting.

Here's a curious case of someone who wasn't happy with a portrait taken of himself. A fugitive recently sent a selfie to police because he hated the "terrible" mugshot the department published.

Nothing like a good T-Shirt to spruce up a mugshot right? Well, maybe not, but in the case of 19-year-old Robert Burt of Pittsfield, Maine the shirt definitely did add something to what would otherwise be your standard booking shot.

That's because the T-Shirt, you'll notice if you look closely, features Burt's previous mugshot from the selfsame Somerset County Jail.

Want further evidence of how far the concept of a "selfie" has spread in our culture? Look no further than this wacky Selfie Toaster by the Vermont Novelty Toaster Corp. Simply provide your favorite shot of your beautiful face, and the company will send you a toaster that can burn your likeness into toast for your morning meal.

It pays to have a mugshot photographer who knows their lighting. Jeremy Meeks, the 30-year-old alleged criminal whose 'sexy' mugshot took the Internet by storm sparking Twitter movements and Facebook Pages dedicated to his beautiful bone structure, has apparently signed a $30K modeling contract with Blaze Models in LA.

Mugshots aren't exactly known as the height of beautiful portrait photography, but 30-year-old felon Jeremy Meeks' mugshot is something else entirely. Within 24 hours of the photo being posted on the Stockton Police Department's Facebook, Meeks' glamour shot had received over 23,000 likes and nearly 6,000 comments... as of this writing those numbers are up to over 87,000 likes and over 11,300 comments.

It's safe to say this image has gone well and truly viral, turning Meeks into a meme and sparking everything from Photoshop spoofs to a 'Free Jeremy' Twitter campaign.

Back in 2009, award-winning editorial art director and artist Mark Michaelson released his book Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots. In it he had compiled more than 10,000 mug shot portraits taken between the 1870s and 1970s. Portraits of the "punks, sneaks, mooks and miscreants" he referred to as the "Least Wanted."

For his portrait series Wanted, London-based photographer Nick Dolding decided to recreate some of the most striking of the mug shots found within Michaelson's book.

Oakland Raiders football player Desmond Bryant was arrested this past weekend and charged with misdemeanor criminal mischief (apparently the 27-year-old show up at a neighbor's house drunk). While it's not uncommon for a famous athlete to find themselves in jail, Bryant's case is attracting quite a bit of attention due to the ridiculous way he posed for his mugshot (seen above) when he was booked at around 9:30 in the morning on Sunday.

Several mugshot websites -- including Just Mugshots, Busted! Mugshots, Mugshots Online, and MugRemove -- are ringing in the new year with a massive class action law suit. According to NPR, hundreds of people who have been exonerated of all charges and had their records sealed are suing the websites for not only keeping their mugshots up and using them in banner ads, but refusing to take them down and "scrub" them off the Internet unless the victims pay a hefty fee.

Earlier this year, a set of mugshots from the 1920s showing Australian criminals made the rounds on the Internet. When art director Michael Jason Enriquez came across this portraits, he was struck by the artsy-ness of the photos. He writes,

There’s a strange connection that draws us into vintage photographs. Seeing doppelgängers (look-a-likes) in old pictures is our brain’s way of linking us to the past. We see what isn’t there - someone recognizable, a family member, maybe a friend, and then there are the ones that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern day celebrities. We’re so used to seeing celebrity faces on our tv, on blogs, and we even know what their mugshots look like. The tacky looking mugshots we have today are in stark contrast to the mugshots taken in the 1920’s. Vintage mugshots have an eerie beauty to them that’s lost in current mugshot photography. What would celebrity mugshots, the ones we’ve become accustomed to seeing on TMZ, look like if instead they were taken in the 1920’s?

Enriquez decided to find out, and created Mugshot Doppleganger, a website to which he posts Photoshopped images of celebrity booking portraits fused with 1920s mugshots.

Some people who find themselves on hard times try to have themselves arrested so that they can eat for free in prison. It turns out that people in Southern California can do the same thing for a free studio-style headshot. Cat Cora, a chef on the Food Network show Iron Chef, recently got booked for a DUI after drinking three beers and getting behind the wheel. Her mugshot wasn't taken until 11 days after her arrest, so Cora had time to have her hair and makeup done in order to pose for a picture-perfect mugshot. When the photo made its way onto the Internet, websites began to comment on how it looks more like a studio portrait than a police station mugshot.

Want to see what you would look like as an outlaw from the 1800s? With Mugshot Yourself, you can!

It's a simple web app that takes your portrait and combines it with the face of an actual New York City criminal from 1864. You can provide a photo using your webcam, by uploading one, or by selecting a Facebook profile picture.

To show off its collection of eyewear for kids, Very French Gangsters shot cute mugshot-style portraits of gangster children who were obviously booked for being too hip for their own good.

There was a minor hoopla yesterday after Boing Boing shared that mugshot photos of arrested Occupy Portland protesters were being uploaded by the Portland Police Department to Facebook.