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"Crime Times": Press Freedom, or Elaborate Shakedown?

Have you ever walked into a gas station or convenience store and seen the newspaper with row after row of mug shots?  In central and western Virginia that paper is called Crime Times U.S.A., but there are variations on the theme all across the country. WMRA’s Kara Lofton talked with Crime Times owner Brad McMurray, and with one of the men who have appeared in the paper, to discuss its controversial business model.

Here’s how it works: When you’re arrested in Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Warren County or anywhere in between, you have a mug shot taken. Every week, Crime Times U.S.A. requests those mug shots from local sheriff’s departments (as is their right per the Freedom of Information Act, also known as FOIA) and publishes them.

BRAD MCMURRAY: When I first saw a paper like that I thought it was right on the line of…crossing the line into someone’s privacy or not.

That was Brad McMurray, one of Crime Time’s owners. (McMurray’s business partner is his father.)

MCMURRAY: But it was the 2007 open records act [the Open Government Act of 2007] that codified what was in the public domain.

The sheriff’s department has five days to complete the FOIA request. Some jurisdictions perform the service for free. Others charge. Fairfax, a jurisdiction the McMurrays are trying to break into, wants $2500 a week for their services; the McMurrays are unwilling to pay more $300. 

MCMURRAY: It was just an entrepreneurial opportunity for us. We knew other papers were going to be here and why not us? So we basically just beat them to the market.

The paper is incredibly successful, selling about 17,000 copies a week at $1.25 a pop. Overhead is low. A new website provides extra income by allowing customers to buy electronic copies at $1.75 each.  But what if you’re one of the ones whose mug shot gets published?  To get it removed, you usually have to pay a $200 fee through an inquiry feature on the website called “Mugshot-related questions.”  But most people don’t request their mugshot be removed – the fee is too high.

McMurray says public reaction to the paper varies from “if you don’t want your picture in the paper, don’t commit a crime,” to others who view it as an invasion of privacy. One of the latter is Victoria Graff Cash, a licensed clinical social worker who runs counseling groups for local sex offenders.

VICTORIA GRAFF CASH: Part of the thing that I don’t think most people don’t readily understand is that those are mug shots taken when someone has been arrested or charged.  Many of those folks don’t go on to be convicted; they don’t go on to court many times. Charges may be dropped, they may be found not guilty. So people see the magazine and think conviction. Think that this is what that person has done automatically and that’s unfair. Because you are innocent until proven guilty. And the magazine presents people in their worst light. 

But McMurray says in publication

MCMURRAY: There’s no victim involved. It’s just something that’s embarrassing.

But then

MCMURRAY: Some people have said that it’s worse to be in the Crime Times than it is to be in jail.

LOFTON: Why is that?

MCMURRAY: Just because it’s kind of like a modern stockade – everybody sees it.

But for those in the paper, implications can reach far beyond shame.

JACOB LESTER: One of the things you learn pretty quickly is that Crime Times is a thing that really sucks and really wrecks people’s lives. It doesn’t wreck mine at all but for a lot of people it’s really uncomfortable.

That was a Jacob Lester. He was arrested in late 2011 for possession of child pornography.  He appeared in one of this year’s special issues. Cash explains.

CASH: I’ve had guys who are already off probation, whose crimes were ten years ago, who have done absolutely nothing in those ten years that have brought them again to the attention of authorities, yet their picture appears, their charge appears.

But even Cash admits

CASH:  There are men that will appear in that magazine who aren’t doing well, who haven’t gotten treatment, who haven’t made attempts to live their life in a different, more productive fashion and who haven’t accepted the goal of no new victims.

And then there are others

CASH: I’ve had guys who have been told not to eat at restaurants, following their publication, one person had bad experiences at their bank…had a guy whose business failed – people came and said “you’re a sex-offender and we’re not coming here anymore.”

Which she argues makes it even more difficult for offenders to reintegrate themselves into society - as is the goal with the American legal system.

So we are left with an interesting quandary. McMurray argues that if he and his father weren’t publishing the paper, someone else would because the market for his publication is so strong. For example, he said, Gotcha!, a similar publication out of Richmond, received the award “2011 Virginia new paper of the year.”

But Crime Times?

MCMURRAY: We wanted to be different from all these other papers. All the other papers just make fun of everybody. Gotcha! Their centerfold is, you know, they put them in classifications of “drunk tank, messed up hair, messed up…

McMurray doesn’t claim Crime Times gives dignity to the people who appear in it. But, he says, it also doesn’t attempt to make fun of them, instead simply publicizing the fact that someone was charged.

Kara Lofton is a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, VA. She is a 2014 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University and has been published by EMU, Sojourners Magazine, and The Mennonite. Her reporting for WMRA is her radio debut.