Email
Print
FeedPremature Shame
Listen. I deplore drunk driving as much as the next guy, but the Honolulu Police Department’s new plan to post online the names and photos of everyone arrested for a DUI is a horrible idea.
Even if we accept the proposition (and I’m not sure that I do) that public humiliation is an effective deterrent to soused citizens hopping behind the wheel, why are the police so eager to defame the reputations of Hawaii residents who have not yet been convicted of any crime? Just to emphasize—these are photos of arrestees being posted. Are we not doing the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing anymore? Are we so in a rush to shame ne’er-do-wells that we can’t wait for the due process of the law?
I’ll concede that police arrests are public information, and routinely reported on by the daily newspapers. But the trumpeting of that information for a program like this seems beyond the pale, both because its primary purpose seems to be to punish those included on the wall of shame, and because this punishment is being administered by an official government agency.
The frustrating thing is that it would have been so easy to accomplish the same mission in a responsible way—simply publish the names and photos of convicted drunk drivers, and leave it up to the courts, not the cops, to hand out punishment.
Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 in General | Permalink
